type is a refinement on the English blonde--greater delicacy of form,
feature, and color. A beautiful Kentucky woman is apt to be exceedingly
beautiful. Her voice is low and soft; her hands and feet delicately
formed; her skin pure and beautiful in tint and shading; her eyes blue
or brown, and hair nut brown or golden brown; to all which is added a
certain unapproachable refinement. It must not for a moment be supposed,
however, that there are not many genuinely ugly women in Kentucky.
UNCLE TOM AT HOME
I
On the outskirts of the towns of central Kentucky, a stranger, searching
for the picturesque in architecture and in life, would find his
attention arrested by certain masses of low frame and brick structures,
and by the multitudes of strange human beings that inhabit them. A
single town may have on its edges several of these settlements, which
are themselves called "towns," and bear separate names either
descriptive of some topographical peculiarity or taken from the original
owners of the lots. It is in these that a great part of the negro
population of Kentucky has packed itself since the war. Here live the
slaves of the past with their descendants; old family servants from the
once populous country-places; old wagon-drivers from the deep-rutted
lanes; old wood-choppers from the slaughtered blue-grass forests; old
harvesters and ploughmen from the long since abandoned fields; old cooks
from the savory, wasteful kitchens; old nurses from the softly rocked
and softly sung-to cradles. Here, too, are the homes of the younger
generation, of the laundresses and the barbers, teachers and ministers
of the gospel, coachmen and porters, restaurant-keepers and vagabonds,
hands from the hemp factories, and workmen on the outlying farms.
You step easily from the verge of the white population to the confines
of the black. But it is a great distance--like the crossing of a vast
continent between the habitats of alien races. The air seems all at once
to tan the cheek. Out of the cold, blue recesses of the midsummer sky
the sun burns with a fierceness of heat that warps the shingles of the
pointed roofs and flares with blinding brilliancy against some
whitewashed wall. Perhaps in all the street no little cooling stretch of
shade. The unpaved sidewalks and the roadway between are but
indistinguishable parts of a common thoroughfare, along which every
upspringing green thing is quickly trodden to death beneath the
ubiquitous play and passing of many feet. Here and there, from some
shielded nook or other coign of vantage, a single plumy branch of
dog-fennel may be seen spreading its small firmament of white and golden
stars close to the ground; or between its pale green stalks the faint
lavender of the nightshade will take the eye as the sole emblem of the
flowering world.
A negro town! Looking out the doors and windows of the cabins, lounging
in the door-ways, leaning over the low frame fences, gathering into
quickly forming, quickly dissolving groups in the dusty streets, they
swarm. They are here from milk-white through all deepening shades to
glossy blackness; octoroons, quadroons, mulattoes--some with large
liquid black eyes, refined features, delicate forms; working, gossiping,
higgling over prices around a vegetable cart, discussing last night's
church festival, to-day's funeral, or next week's railway excursion,
sleeping, planning how to get work and how to escape it. From some
unseen old figure in flamboyant turban, bending over the wash-tub in the
rear of a cabin, comes a crooned song of indescribable pathos; behind a
half-closed front shutter, a Moorish-hued _amosoro_ in gay linen thrums
his banjo in a measure of ecstatic gayety preluding the more passionate
melodies of the coming night. Here a fight; there the sound of the
fiddle and the rhythmic patting of hands. Tatters and silks flaunt
themselves side by side. Dirt and cleanliness lie down together.
Indolence goes hand in hand with thrift. Superstition dogs the slow
footsteps of reason. Passion and self-control eye each other across the
narrow way. If there is anywhere resolute virtue, round it is a weltered
muck of low and sensual desire. One sees the surviving types of old
negro life here crowded together with and contrasted with the new phases
of "colored" life--sees the transitional stage of a race, part of whom
were born slaves and are now freemen, part of whom have been born
freemen but remain so much like slaves.
It cannot fail to happen, as you walk along, that you will come upon
some cabin set back in a small yard and half hidden, front and side, by
an almost tropical jungle of vines and multiform foliage: patches of
great sunflowers, never more leonine in tawny magnificence and
sun-loving repose; festoons of white and purple morning-glories over the
windows and up to the low eaves; around the porch and above the
door-way, a trellis of gourd-vines swinging their long-necked, grotesque
yellow fruit; about the entrance flaming hollyhocks and other brilliant
bits of bloom, marigolds and petunias--evidences of the warm, native
taste that still distinguishes the negro after some centuries of contact
with the cold, chastened ideals of the Anglo-Saxon.
In the door-way of such a cabin, sheltered from the afternoon sun by his
dense jungle of vines, but with a few rays of light glinting through the
fluttering leaves across his seamed black face and white woolly head,
the muscles of his once powerful arms shrunken, the gnarled hands folded
idly in his lap--his occupation gone--you will haply see some old-time
slave of the class of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom. For it is true that
scattered here and there throughout the negro towns of Kentucky are
representatives of the same class that furnished her with her hero;
true, also, that they were never sold by their Kentucky masters to the
plantations of the South, but remained unsold down to the last days of
slavery.
When the war scattered the negroes of Kentucky blindly, tumultuously,
hither and thither, many of them gathered the members of their families
about them and moved from the country into these "towns;" and here the
few survivors live, ready to testify of their relations with their
former masters and mistresses, and indirectly serving to point a great
moral: that, however justly Mrs. Stowe may have chosen one of their
number as best fitted to show the fairest aspects of domestic slavery in
the United States, she departed from the common truth of history, as it
respected their lot in life, when she condemned her Uncle Tom to his
tragical fate. For it was not the _character_ of Uncle Tom that she
greatly idealized, as has been so often asserted; it was the category of
events that were made to befall him.
As citizens of the American Republic, these old negroes--now known as
"colored gentlemen," surrounded by "colored ladies and gentlemen"--have
not done a great deal. The bud of liberty was ingrafted too late on the
ancient slave-stock to bear much fruit. But they are interesting, as
contemporaries of a type of Kentucky negro whose virtues and whose
sorrows, dramatically embodied in literature, have become a by-word
throughout the civilized world. And now that the war-cloud is lifting
from over the landscape of the past, so that it lies still clear to the
eyes of those who were once the dwellers amid its scenes, it is perhaps
a good time to scan it and note some of its great moral landmarks before
it grows remoter and is finally forgotten.
II
These three types--Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom, and the Shelbys, his master
and mistress--were the outgrowth of natural and historic conditions
peculiar to Kentucky. "Perhaps," wrote Mrs. Stowe in her novel, "the
mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of
Kentucky. The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and
gradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and
pressure that are called for in the business of more southern districts,
makes the task of the negro a more healthful and reasonable one; while
the master, content with a more gradual style of acquisition, had not
those temptations to hard-heartedness which always overcome frail human
nature, when the prospect of sudden and rapid gain is weighed in the
balance with no heavier counterpoise than the interests of the helpless
and unprotected." These words contain many truths.
For it must not be forgotten, first of all, that the condition of the
slave in Kentucky was measurably determined by certain physical laws
which lay beyond the control of the most inhuman master. Consider the
nature of the country--elevated, rolling, without miasmatic districts or
fatal swamps; the soil in the main slave-holding portions of the State
easily tilled, abundantly yielding; the climate temperate and
invigorating. Consider the system of agriculture--not that of vast
plantations, but of small farms, part of which regularly consisted of
woodland and meadow that required little attention. Consider the further
limitations to this system imposed by the range of the great Kentucky
staples--it being in the nature of corn, wheat, hemp, and tobacco, not
to yield profits sufficient to justify the employment of an immense
predial force, nor to require seasons of forced and exhausting labor. It
is evident that under such conditions slavery was not stamped with those
sadder features which it wore beneath a devastating sun, amid unhealthy
or sterile regions of country, and through the herding together of
hundreds of slaves who had the outward but not the inward discipline of
an army. True, one recalls here the often quoted words of Jefferson on
the raising of tobacco--words nearly as often misapplied as quoted; for
he was considering the condition of slaves who were unmercifully worked
on exhausted lands by a certain proletarian type of master, who did not
feed and clothe them. Only under such circumstances could the culture of
this plant be described as "productive of infinite wretchedness," and
those engaged in it as "in a continual state of exertion beyond the
powers of nature to support." It was by reason of these physical facts
that slavery in Kentucky assumed the phase which is to be distinguished
as domestic; and it was this mode that had prevailed at the North and
made emancipation easy.
Furthermore, in all history the condition of an enslaved race under the
enslaving one has been partly determined by the degree of moral
justification with which the latter has regarded the subject of human
bondage; and the life of the Kentucky negro, say in the days of Uncle
Tom, was further modified by the body of laws which had crystallized as
the sentiment of the people, slave-holders themselves. But even these
laws were only a partial exponent of what that sentiment was; for some
of the severest were practically a dead letter, and the clemency of the
negro's treatment by the prevailing type of master made amends for the
hard provisions of others.
It would be a difficult thing to write the history of slavery in
Kentucky. It is impossible to write a single page of it here. But it may
be said that the conscience of the great body of the people was always
sensitive touching the rightfulness of the institution. At the very
outset it seems to have been recognized simply for the reason that the
early settlers were emigrants from slave-holding States and brought
their negroes with them. The commonwealth began its legislation on the
subject in the face of an opposing sentiment. By early statute
restriction was placed on the importation of slaves, and from the first
they began to be emancipated. Throughout the seventy-five years of
pro-slavery State-life, the general conscience was always troubled.
The churches took up the matter. Great preachers, whose names were
influential beyond the State, denounced the system from the pulpit,
pleaded for the humane and Christian treatment of slaves, advocated
gradual emancipation. One religious body after another proclaimed the
moral evil of it, and urged that the young be taught and prepared as
soon as possible for freedom. Antislavery publications and addresses,
together with the bold words of great political leaders, acted as a
further leaven in the mind of the slave-holding class. As evidence of
this, when the new constitution of the State was to be adopted, about
1850, thirty thousand votes were cast in favor of an open clause in it,
whereby gradual emancipation should become a law as soon as the majority
of the citizens should deem it expedient for the peace of society; and
these votes represented the richest, most intelligent slave-holders in
the State.
In general the laws were perhaps the mildest. Some it is vital to the
subject not to pass over. If slaves were inhumanly treated by their
owner or not supplied with proper food and clothing, they could be taken
from him and sold to a better master. This law was not inoperative. I
have in mind the instance of a family who lost their negroes in this
way, were socially disgraced, and left their neighborhood. If the owner
of a slave had bought him on condition of not selling him out of the
county, or into the Southern States, or so as not to separate him from
his family, he could be sued for violation of contract. This law shows
the opposition of the better class of Kentucky masters to the
slave-trade, and their peculiar regard for the family ties of
their negroes. In the earliest Kentucky newspapers will be found
advertisements of the sales of negroes, on condition that they would be
bought and kept within the county or the State. It was within chancery
jurisdiction to prevent the separation of families. The case may be
mentioned of a master who was tried by his Church for unnecessarily
separating a husband from his wife. Sometimes slaves who had been
liberated and had gone to Canada voluntarily returned into service under
their former masters. Lest these should be overreached, they were to be
taken aside and examined by the court to see that they understood the
consequences of their own action, and were free from improper
constraint. On the other hand, if a slave had a right to his freedom, he
could file a bill in chancery and enforce his master's assent thereto.
But a clear distinction must be made between the mild view entertained
by the Kentucky slave-holders regarding the system itself and their
dislike of the agitators of forcible and immediate emancipation. A
community of masters, themselves humane to their negroes and probably
intending to liberate them in the end, would yet combine into a mob to
put down individual or organized antislavery efforts, because they
resented what they regarded an interference of the abolitionist with
their own affairs, and believed his measures inexpedient for the peace
of society. Therefore, the history of the antislavery movement in
Kentucky, at times so turbulent, must not be used to show the sentiment
of the people regarding slavery itself.
III
From these general considerations it is possible to enter more closely
upon a study of the domestic life and relations of Uncle Tom and the
Shelbys.
"Whoever visits some estates there," wrote Mrs. Stowe, "and witnesses
the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses and the
affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream of the
oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution." Along with these
words, taken from _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, I should like to quote an extract
from a letter written me by Mrs. Stowe under date of April 30, 1886:
"In relation to your letter, I would say that I never lived in
Kentucky, but spent many years in Cincinnati, which is separated
from Kentucky only by the Ohio River, which, as a shrewd
politician remarked, was dry one-half the year and frozen the
other. My father was president of a theological seminary at Walnut
Hills, near Cincinnati, and with him I travelled and visited
somewhat extensively in Kentucky, and there became acquainted
with those excellent slave-holders delineated in _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. I saw many counterparts of the Shelbys--people humane,
conscientious, just and generous, who regarded slavery as an evil
and were anxiously considering their duties to the slave. But
it was not till I had finally left the West, and my husband was
settled as professor in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, that
the passage of the fugitive-slave law and the distresses that
followed it drew this from me."
The typical boy on a Kentucky farm was tenderly associated from infancy
with the negroes of the household and the fields. His old black "Mammy"
became almost his first mother, and was but slowly crowded out of his
conscience and his heart by the growing image of the true one. She had
perhaps nursed him at her bosom when he was not long enough to stretch
across it, sung over his cradle at noon and at midnight, taken him out
upon the velvety grass beneath the shade of the elm-trees to watch his
first manly resolution of standing alone in the world and walking the
vast distance of some inches. Often, in boyish years, when flying from
the house with a loud appeal from the incomprehensible code of
Anglo-Saxon punishment for small misdemeanors, he had run to those black
arms and cried himself to sleep in the lap of African sympathy. As he
grew older, alas! his first love grew faithless; and while "Mammy" was
good enough in her way and sphere, his wandering affections settled
humbly at the feet of another great functionary of the household--the
cook in the kitchen. To him her keys were as the keys to the kingdom of
heaven, for his immortal soul was his immortal appetite. When he stood
by the biscuit bench while she, pausing amid the varied industries that
went into the preparation of an old-time Kentucky supper, made him
marvellous geese of dough, with farinaceous feathers and genuine
coffee-grains for eyes, there was to him no other artist in the world
who possessed the secret of so commingling the useful with the
beautiful.
[Illustration: THE MAMMY.]
The little half-naked imps, too, playing in the dirt like glossy
blackbirds taking a bath of dust, were his sweetest, because perhaps his
forbidden, companions. With them he went clandestinely to the fatal
duck-pond in the stable lot, to learn the art of swimming on a walnut
rail. With them he raced up and down the lane on blooded alder-stalk
horses, afterwards leading the exhausted coursers into stables of green
bushes and haltering them high with a cotton string. It was one of these
hatless children of original Guinea that had crept up to him as he lay
asleep in the summer grass and told him where the best hidden of all
nests was to be found in a far fence corner--that of the high-tempered,
scolding guinea-hen. To them he showed his first Barlow knife; for them
he blew his first home-made whistle. He is their petty tyrant to-day;
to-morrow he will be their repentant friend, dividing with them his
marbles and proposing a game of hopscotch. Upon his dialect, his
disposition, his whole character, is laid the ineffaceable impress of
theirs, so that they pass into the final reckoning-up of his life here
and in the world to come.
But Uncle Tom!--the negro overseer of the place--the greatest of all the
negroes--greater even than the cook, when one is not hungry. How often
has he straddled Uncle Tom's neck, or ridden behind him afield on a
barebacked horse to the jingling music of the trace-chains! It is Uncle
Tom who plaits his hempen whip and ties the cracker in a knot that will
stay. It is Uncle Tom who brings him his first young squirrel to tame,
the teeth of which are soon to be planted in his right forefinger. Many
a time he slips out of the house to take his dinner or supper in the
cabin with Uncle Tom; and during long winter evenings he loves to sit
before those great roaring cabin fireplaces that throw their red and
yellow lights over the half circle of black faces and on the mysteries
of broom-making, chair-bottoming, and the cobbling of shoes. Like the
child who listens to "Uncle Remus," he, too, hears songs and stories,
and creeps back to the house with a wondering look in his eyes and a
vague hush of spirit.
Then come school-days and vacations during which, as Mrs. Stowe says,
he may teach Uncle Tom to make his letters on a slate or expound to him
the Scriptures. Then, too, come early adventures with the gun, and 'coon
hunts and 'possum hunts with the negroes under the round moon, with the
long-eared, deep-voiced hounds--to him delicious and ever-memorable
nights! The crisp air, through which the breath rises like white
incense, the thick autumn leaves, begemmed with frost, rustling
underfoot; the shadows of the mighty trees; the strained ear; the heart
leaping with excitement; the negroes and dogs mingling their wild
delight in music that wakes the echoes of distant hill-sides. Away!
Away! mile after mile, hour after hour, to where the purple and golden
persimmons hang low from the boughs, or where from topmost limbs the
wild grape drops its countless clusters in a black cascade a sheer two
hundred feet.
Now he is a boy no longer, but has his first love-affair, which sends a
thrill through all those susceptible cabins; has his courtship, which
gives rise to many a wink and innuendo; and brings home his bride, whose
coming converts every youngster into a living rolling ball on the
ground, and opens the feasts and festivities of universal joy.
Then some day "ole Marster" dies, and the negroes, one by one, young and
old, file into the darkened parlor to take a last look at his quiet
face. He had his furious temper, "ole Marster" had, and his sins--which
God forgive! To-day he will be buried, and to-morrow "young Marster"
will inherit his saddle-horse and ride out into the fields.
Thus he has come into possession of his negroes. Among them are a few
whose working days are over. These are to be kindly cared for, decently
buried. Next are the active laborers, and, last, the generation of
children. He knows them all by name, capacity, and disposition; is bound
to them by life-long associations; hears their communications and
complaints. When he goes to town, he is charged with commissions, makes
purchases with their own money. Continuing the course of his father, he
sets about making them capable, contented workmen. There shall be
special training for special aptitude. One shall be made a blacksmith, a
second a carpenter, a third a cobbler of shoes. In all the general
industries of the farm, education shall not be lacking. It is claimed
that a Kentucky negro invented the hemp-brake. As a result of this
effective management, the Southern planter, looking northward, will pay
him a handsome premium for his blue-grass slave. He will have no white
overseer. He does not like the type of man. Besides, one is not needed.
Uncle Tom served his father in this capacity; let him be.
Among his negroes he finds a bad one. What shall he do with him? Keep
him? Keeping him makes him worse, and moreover he corrupts the
others. Set him free? That is to put a reward upon evil. Sell him to
his neighbors? They do not want him. If they did, he would not sell him
to them. He sells him into the South. This is a statement, not an
apology. Here, for a moment, one touches the terrible subject of the
internal slave-trade. Negroes were sold from Kentucky into the Southern
market because, as has just been said, they were bad, or by reason of
the law of partible inheritance, or, as was the case with Mrs. Stowe's
Uncle Tom, under constraint of debt. Of course, in many cases, they were
sold wantonly and cruelly; but these, however many, were not enough to
make the internal slave-trade more than an incidental and subordinate
feature of the system. The belief that negroes in Kentucky were
regularly bred and reared for the Southern market is a mistaken one.
Mrs. Stowe herself fell into the error of basing an argument for the
prevalence of the slave-trade in this State upon the notion of exhausted
lands, as the following passage from _The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_
shows:
[Illustration: THE COOK.]