Part 6

"We passed by it on our way here from Westlake's. But we saw only the fine trees on the border. We did not enter. Why doesn't he sell it, let it, have it occupied by some one who might get a support from it? Or does he carry his respect for liberty so far that he thinks it a sin for a man to compel the earth to supply his needs?"

"He is, as you say, an enthusiast. He regards the culture of the earth as a religious work, and thinks it sacrilege to carry it on in the frantic pursuit of exorbitant gain, watering the innocent soil with tears and the painful sweat of unrewarded labor. But he has not given up the hope of returning."

"What! does he repent his rashness already?"

"No; but he loves his native State, and believes in it."

"Nobody interferes with Harvey; nobody objects to his reforms," said the Doctor, after a little silence.

"Because they lead to nothing," answered Harry.

"They have led to giving him a splendid income, and to giving his people as much comfort as they can appreciate, and as much instruction as they can profit by. Harvey is really a religious man. He regards his relation to his slaves as a providential one, and does not believe he has a right to break it off violently, as Shaler has done."

I had all along tried, in these discussions, to maintain an impartial tone, confining myself to a simple statement of facts, and leaving the controversy to the Doctor and Harry; but I had been gradually losing my coolness, and found myself more and more drawn to take a side. The repetition of this reflection upon Shaler was more than I could bear.

"There is certainly," I said, "a wide difference between Shaler's view of the relation of the master to his laborers and Harvey's. Shaler believed that these dependent beings were a charge intrusted to him by their Maker and his. As unto him more had been given than unto them, of him, he knew, more would be required. Harvey supposes that these inferior creatures have been given to him for his use. His part is to supply them with sustenance, and to show them so much of kindness and indulgence as is consistent with keeping them in the condition to which they have been called; theirs is to serve him with all their soul and all their strength, to render him an unqualified obedience, to subordinate even the most sacred ties of nature to their attachment to him. Here is, indeed, no danger to slavery. Ameliorations, under such conditions, fortify instead of undermining it. The sight of an apparent well-being in this state pacifies uneasy consciences in the master-class; while the slave, subjugated by ideas instilled from infancy, not less than by the inexorable material force which incloses him, finds even his own conscience enlisted in his oppressor's service, steeled and armed against himself."

"You wrong Frank Harvey, if you suppose he allows his slaves a mere animal support; he has them taught what is needful for them to know."

"He has them taught just so much as shall increase their usefulness to him, without giving them a dangerous self-reliance."

"Precisely, so far as secular knowledge is concerned. And it is possible he may be right in view of their interests as well as of his own. But he allows them religious instruction to any extent,--takes care that they have it."

"The religious instruction allowed by Harvey, and by other humane slaveholders who maintain the lawfulness of slavery, inculcates the service of the earthly master as the fulfilment of the practical service of God on earth. For the rest, the slaves are allowed to look forward to another world, to which this life is a sorrowful passage,--whose toils, pains, and privations, however unnecessary and resultless, are, if only passively accepted, to be compensated by proportionate enjoyments."

"This constitutes, then, the whole of the much talked-of religion of your negro Christians?"

"Of too many; but the promise, 'Ask, and ye shall receive,' was made to them as to all. Even to the slave-cabin has been sent the Comforter who teacheth all things. But we were speaking not so much of the religion of the slaves as of the religious instruction given or allowed them by their masters. It is necessarily circumscribed, as I have told you."

"What was the creed inculcated upon Colonel Shaler's protégés?"

"They were taught that life, even earthly life, is a sacred and precious gift, for which they were to show themselves grateful by keeping it pure and noble and by filling it with useful work. They were taught that duty to God consists not in mere acquiescence, but in active obedience. They were taught that there are earthly duties which no human being can lay down; that on the relation of husband and wife, of parent and child, all other human relations are founded. In short, Shaler recognized men in his slaves. He attributed to them the natural rights of men, and the responsibilities of civilized and Christian men."

"And his neighbors unreasonably took umbrage! Mind, I am no upholder of slavery. I am merely speaking of what is, not of what ought to be. A slaveholder, meaning to remain one, can yield nothing in principle, let him be as indulgent as he will in practice. What becomes of his title in the slave-family, if the slave-father has one that he is religiously bound to maintain and the rest of the world to respect? The master is the owner no longer. The property has died a natural death."

So slavery dies before Christianity without formal sentence.

"But," the Doctor began, in a different tone, passing lightly from a train of argument which might have led him where he had not meant to go, "I should never have taken Shaler to be the lowly-minded man you represent him. I cannot imagine his people addressing him with the familiarity that even Harvey permits; still less can I think of him as treating them with the good-natured roughness of your neighbor Westlake."

"I have never seen him followed about his place by a crowd of begging children, nor throwing down coppers or sugar-plums to be scrambled and squabbled for."

"Nor tweaking their ears, I suppose," broke in the Doctor, laughing, "nor pulling their hair to make them squeal and rub their heads, and grin gratefully under the flattering pain of master's condescension. I have witnessed these little urbanities. I have not met with a case of the hailing with sugar-plums; but I have known Westlake pelt his people with some pretty heavy oaths, which were as acceptable, to judge by the bobbings and duckings and mowings with which they were received. He is very fond of his people, he tells me, and especially of a distinguished old crone who was his nurse, and who is to be gratified with a majestic funeral. She was impartially graced with his emphatic compliments, and did her utmost to make an adequate return in 'nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.' So I suppose it was understood that he was expressing himself in the accepted terms of patrician endearment. Probably Shaler's affection for his wards was not so demonstrative?"

"There was in his manner to them a considerate kindness,--not familiar, yet intimate; in theirs to him an affectionate reverence. He was well fitted to be the chief of a primitive people."

"He would have been sure of election in the days when being taller by the head and shoulders than the common crowd was a qualification."

"He had the qualification of the ordained as well as that of the popular leader: 'A comely person, and _the Lord is with him_.' This last is the mark of the true rulers by divine right,--of the men who seem framed to be the conductors of higher influences. The less finely organized

"'Know them, as soon as seen, to be their lords, And reverence the secret God in them.'"

Harry's beautiful face was wonderfully illuminated. Strange, this unconscious consciousness of the elect!

"The relation of master and slave," I went on,--for the Doctor did not offer to speak,--"is, in Shaler's opinion, a most perverted and unnatural one; but he believes in that of protector and protected. The love of power, the instinct of dominion, is strong in him. Perhaps it must be so in those who are to be called to its exercise. 'I know thy pride,' David's elder brother said to him, when the boy left the charge of his few sheep to offer himself as the champion of a nation. But Shaler's ambition was directed by the precept, 'Let him who would be greatest among you be your servant';--whether deliberately, or by the spontaneous flow of his large, generous nature, I do not know. Whatever superiority he possessed, whether of position, education, or natural endowment, he employed for the advantage of the people under his care. All the proceeds of the estate were spent upon it. The land was brought into a high state of cultivation. Its productiveness was not only maintained, but increased. Nor was beauty neglected. Groves were planted, marshes drained, ponds formed. The old cabins gave place to new and pretty cottages. The owners and builders were encouraged to employ their own invention on them; thus there was great variety in the architecture. Vines planted about them, by favor of our kind climate, soon draped them luxuriantly, harmonizing the whole, and giving even to eccentricities of form a beauty of their own. While he took care that ability and energy should enjoy their just return of prosperity, the inferior, whether in body, mind, or soul, were not Pariahs. As Shaler believed the exercise of beneficent power to be the greatest privilege accorded to mortals, he made it one of the chief rewards of exertion."

"Was the privilege appreciated?" asked the Doctor.

"The slave of a tyrannical master is too often the most brutal of oppressors; but disinterestedness and tenderness have a sympathetic force, no less, surely, than rapacity and cruelty. Besides, with a race in which sense of honor is so leading a characteristic as in the African, the glory of being the doer and the giver, the shame of being the mere idle recipient, are very potent. Shaler was not too wise and good for dealing with ordinary human nature; he was considerate of innocent weaknesses, even of those with which his nature least enabled him to sympathize. He found, for example, that his people did not like to see the 'great house' on their estate surpassed in furniture and decoration by the mansions of neighboring planters. He respected their simple pride. He understood that his house was their palace, their state-house,--that their wish to embellish it was, in fact, a form of public spirit. He indulged them in what was no indulgence to himself."

"Harvey has rather the advantage of him there: he can please himself and his people at the same time. How long have you known the Harvey plantation,--Land's End, as Judge Harvey called it, when he first came to settle here?"

WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1844.

"How long have you known the Harvey plantation?" Dr. Borrow had just asked me.

"Ten years," I answered. "I was there for the first time about three years after Mr. Frank Harvey came back from Europe."

"I was there nearly twenty-three years ago. Frank and I had just left Harvard. We were both going to finish our studies abroad. We were to sail together. Frank must go home for a visit first, and asked me to go with him. I saw slavery then for the first time. I had heard enough about it before. We had just been through the Missouri storm. I did not find it, as it showed itself on Judge Harvey's place, 'the sum of all villanies'; though, perhaps, looking back, I may think it was the sum of all absurdities. I did not reason or moralize about it then. I was hardly eighteen, and took things as they came. But to judge of what has been done on that plantation, you should have seen it as I saw it in '21. Sans Souci would have been the right name for it. Not that I liked it the less. I made none of these wise observations then. On the contrary, I was fresh from the study of dead antiquity, and was charmed to find that it wasn't dead at all. It must be admitted, there is a certain dignity in the leisurely ease of primitive peoples, past and present. They seem to think that what they are doing is just as important as what they may be going to do. We moderns and civilized talk a good deal about immortality; but those simple folks have a more vital sense of it: they seem to be conscious that there will be time enough for all they shall ever have to do in it. Old Judge Harvey was a sort of pristine man,--about as easy and indolent as the negroes themselves."

"He was, indeed, of the old type. Formerly, I believe, planters--at least the well-born and well-reputed--were content, if their estates yielded them the means of living generously and hospitably, without display or excessive luxury. They took life easily, and let their people do the same. I have heard that Judge Harvey moved off here, from one of the older Slave States, when the money-making mania came in, hoping to keep up for himself and his people the primitive régime they had grown up under. I believe he was no advocate of slavery."

"The only forcible thing about him was his dislike of it. He had the greatest compassion for the slave of any man I ever saw, and with the best reason, for he was one himself. He was as much the property of his worshippers as the Grand Lama. He always entertained the intention of emancipating himself. But there were legal forms to be gone through with. To encounter them required an immense moral force. His hundred tyrants were, of course, all as happy as clams, and had as little thought of a change of domicile. So there was nothing to stir him up, and there was never any more reason for acting to-day than there had been yesterday. I must do him the justice, however, to say that he made provision for his son's living in freedom, in case he should choose it. In spite of the loose way in which the estate was managed, it yielded, as of its own free will, a pretty fair income. The old man spent little, and so put by really a respectable sum, half of which was to be employed in securing an independence to his son, and the other half in compensating his natural proprietors for the loss of his valuable services. Shaler was not original: the scheme he carried out in the end was old Judge Harvey's exactly,--if, indeed, it was his, and not his daughter's. I always suspected that it originated in the head of that little girl. You know Shaler and she were own cousins. The abolition vein, they say, came down from a grandmother. At any rate, Judge Harvey's plan, as he detailed it to me, was to colonize his blacks in a Free State, each with a pretty little sum in his pocket for a nest egg. He had taken into his confidence---- No, there was no confidence about it; the Judge was as liberal of his thoughts as of everything else; there was not an urchin on the place that might not have known what was planning, for the fatigue of listening; but the gentle flow of the Judge's words was heard as the notes of the birds and the frogs were,--with a little more respect, perhaps, but with no more inquiry after meaning. He had taken, not as the confidant, then, but as the partner of his day-dreams, a man who governed his estate for him,--as far as it was governed,--one of the blackest negroes I ever saw, and one of the cleverest, by name Jasper."

"Jasper!" exclaimed Harry.

"He has fallen from his high estate,--a Belisarius, only not quite blind. It is really almost touching to see him feebly fussing round doing little odd jobs of work about the grounds where he was once monarch of all he surveyed. At the time I speak of he was in his glory. It was worth while to see him holding audience,--according or discarding petitions,--deciding between litigating parties,--pronouncing sentence on offenders, or bestowing public commendation on the performer of some praiseworthy act. He carried on the farm in a loose, Oriental sort of way,--letting the people eat, drink, and be merry, in the first place, and work as much as they found good for them, in the second. With all this, he made the estate do more than pay for itself. It was he who carried the surplus up to Danesville to be invested. He was like the eldest servant in Abraham's house, who ruled over all that he had. Frank treated him with as much respect as, I dare say, Isaac did Eliezer. And I ought to mention that Jasper kept his master's son very handsomely supplied,--paid off his college debts too, without a wry look, though it must have come hard to subtract anything from the hoard. Our Jasper missed it in not having their schemes carried into effect when he might. He could have prevailed, as he did in regard to some other matters, by getting his master embarked in the preliminaries, and then persuading him that 'returning were as tedious as go o'er.' But possibly Jasper himself, having got the habit of power, did not like to lay it down; or perhaps he thought he must always have the store yet a little larger, seeing what Frank's wants were likely to be. And then it probably never occurred to him that a daughter could die before her father. At any rate, it was decided that the Judge should arrange the matter by will, things remaining as they were during his life. He never made a will, any more than he ever did anything else he meant to do. Did you know him?"

"I remember him only as a pale, exhausted old man, drawn about in a garden-chair by Jasper, who was almost as sad and humble-looking then as he is now."

"It was already over with his reign and his projects. All was at an end when Constance died. Her father broke down at once and forever. She was his very soul. When I was there she was only thirteen, but she was art and part in all her father's plans,--if, indeed, they were not hers. If she had lived, they would have been carried out;--though, as far as that is concerned, I believe things are better as they are. But her brother was as much her subject as her father was. There was a force about that gentle, generous creature! It was a force like that of sunshine,--it subdued by delighting. You did not know Constance Harvey?"

"I have seen her at Colonel Shaler's."

"She recognized what her father did not,--the necessity of some preparation for freedom. The law against letters did not exist then, I believe; I remember them, the great and little, painted on boards and put up round a pretty arbor she called her school-house. I don't know whether her pupils ever mastered them or not; but what certainly did prosper was the class for singing, and that for recitation. I had not seen much of men and things then, and had not learned to distinguish the desirable and the practicable. Even I came under the illusion of the hour, and dreamed liberty, equality, and perfectibility with the best. Not that Constance talked about these fine things, but she had an innate faith in them of the sort that makes mole-hills of mountains. Even now, looking back on that diligent, confident child, I seem to feel the 'almost thou persuadest me.' Poor Constance! She died, at twenty-two, of overwork. She wore herself out in efforts to bring her poor barbarians up to the standard her imagination had set for them."

Constance Harvey had a spirit strong enough to have sustained a slighter frame than hers through all the fatigues necessary to the attainment of a great end. She died, not of her work, but of its frustration. She had all power with her father, except to overcome his inertness. To this, as years went on, other hindrances were added. Her brother married a fashionable woman and lived in Paris. His demands forbade the increase of the reserved fund, and soon began to encroach upon it. She urged her brother's return. He replied, that the delicacy of his wife's health made the climate of France necessary to her. His expenses increased, instead of lessening. Constance saw, coming nearer and nearer, a danger far more terrible to her than mere pecuniary embarrassment. She saw that her father must either exercise a courage that she had little hope of, or break his faith with Jasper,--with the faithful people who had worked for them, or rather, as she viewed it, with them, for the accomplishment of a common object. One half of the fund she regarded as a deposit,--as a sacred trust. Until her brother's claims had exhausted the portion always intended to be his, she combated her anxieties, and kept up hope and effort. Through her genius and energy the income of the estate was increased, the expenses diminished, and yet the comforts of the work-people not curtailed. Jasper seconded her bravely. But the hour of dishonor came at last,--came hopeless, irretrievable. She struggled on a little while for her poor father's sake, and Jasper exerted himself strenuously for hers, stimulating the people to renewed industry by his warm appeals. Before, he had roused them with the hope of freedom and independent wealth; now, he urged them to rescue from ruin the generous master who had meant them so much good. But the demands from Paris increased as the means of supplying them diminished. Debt came, and in its train all the varied anguish which debt involves, where human souls are a marketable commodity. Let Dr. Borrow give you the outside of this story, now that you have the key to it.

"Frank and I were not much together after we got to Paris. Our worlds were different. Frank was going from ball to ball and from watering-place to watering-place after Flora Westlake, until they were married, and then they followed the same round together. His father wrote to them to come home and live with him, so Frank told me, and I believe that was what he had expected to do; but Madame Harvey naturally preferred Paris to the World's End; so there they stayed,--Frank always meaning to go home the next year, for eight years. Their establishment, by the way, did Jasper great credit. Then he heard of his sister's death: they could not go home then; it would be too sad. But soon followed news of his father's illness: that started them. On the voyage to New York, he met with this Lenox, liked him, and engaged him for the place he has filled so satisfactorily. He judged wisely: Frank has an excellent head for organizing, but no faculty for administration. Once at home, he devoted himself to his plantation as his sister had done. I believe her example has had a great influence with him. But he has respected her practice more than her theories. He is content to take his people as they are, and to make them useful to themselves and to him. His father lived a few years, but did not meddle with anything. Frank has shown an ability and an energy that nobody expected of a man of leisure and of pleasure like him. Except a short visit to Europe, two summers ago, here he has been steady at his post for twelve years through. His life here is not an hilarious one, for a man of his tastes; but, if doing one's duty is a reason for being happy, Frank Harvey has a right to be so. You think he looks sad, Harry. He does,--and older than his age; but I am afraid there is a nearer cause than you have found for it."

The Doctor sat silent for a few moments with contracted brows; then, throwing off his vexation with an effort, began again,--

"Frederic is expected home in a week or two. Perhaps we shall fall in with him somewhere on our road. I should like to see you together and hear you have a talk about slavery. He is as great a fanatic on one side as you are on the other."