Chapter 25

All the morning, and through the tremendous heat of the middle day, they toiled on without a mouthful of food--without a drop of water. At length, towards the afternoon, the men at the oars said they were utterly exhausted and could row no longer, and that Mr. C---- must steer the boat ashore. With wonderful power of command, he prevailed on them to continue their afflicting labour. The terrible blazing sun pouring on all their unsheltered heads had almost annihilated them; but still there lay between them and the land those fearful foaming ridges, and the women and children, if not the men themselves, seemed doomed to inevitable death in the attempt to surmount them. Suddenly they perceived that the boat that had kept them company was about to adventure itself in the perilous experiment of landing. Mr. C---- kept his boat's head steady, the men rested on their oars, and watched the result of the fearful risk they were themselves about to run. They saw the boat enter the breakers--they saw her whirled round and capsized, and then they watched, slowly emerging and dragging themselves out of the foaming sea, _some_, and only some, of the people that they knew the boat contained. Mr. C----, fortified with this terrible illustration of the peril that awaited them, again besought them to row yet for a little while further along the coast, in search of some possible place to take the boat safely to the beach, promising at sunset to give up the search; and again the poor men resumed their toil, but the line of leaping breakers stretched along the coast as far as eye could see, and at length the men declared they could labour no longer, and insisted that Mr. C---- should steer them to shore. He then said that he would do so, but they must take some rest before encountering the peril which awaited them, and for which they might require whatever remaining strength they could command. He made the men leave the oars and lie down to sleep for a short time, and then, giving the helm to one of them, did the same himself. When they were thus a little refreshed with this short rest, he prepared to take the boat into the breakers.

He laid Mrs. N----'s baby on her breast, and wrapped a shawl round and round her body so as to secure the child to it, and said, in the event of the boat capsizing, he would endeavour to save her and her child. Mrs. F---- and her boy he gave in charge to one of the sailors, and the coloured woman who was with her to the other; and they promised solemnly, in case of misadventure to the boat, to do their best to save these helpless creatures; and so they turned, as the sun was going down, the bows of the boat to the terrible shore. They rose two of the breakers safely, but then the oar of one of the men was struck from his hand, and in an instant the boat whirled round and turned over. Mr. C---- instantly struck out to seize Mrs. N----, but she had sunk, and though he dived twice he could not see her; at last, he felt her hair floating loose with his foot, and seizing hold of it, grasped her securely and swam with her to shore. While in the act of doing so, he saw the man who had promised to save the coloured woman making alone for the beach; and even then, in that extremity, he had power of command enough left to drive the fellow back to seek her, which he did, and brought her safe to land. The other man kept his word of taking care of Mrs. F----, and the latter never released her grasp of her child's wrist, which bore the mark of her agony for weeks after their escape. They reached the sands, and Mrs. N----'s shawl having been unwound, her child was found laughing on her bosom. But hardly had they had time to thank God for their deliverance when Mr. C---- fell fainting on the beach; and Mrs. F----, who told me this, said that for one dreadful moment they thought that the preserver of all their lives had lost his own in the terrible exertion and anxiety that he had undergone. He revived, however, and crawling a little further up the beach, they burrowed for warmth and shelter as well as they could in the sand, and lay there till the next morning, when they sought and found succour.

You cannot imagine, my dear E----, how strikingly throughout this whole narrative the extraordinary power of Mr. C----'s character makes itself felt,--the immediate obedience that he obtained from women whose terror might have made them unmanageable, and men whose selfishness might have defied his control; the wise though painful firmness, which enabled him to order the boat away from the side of the perishing vessel, in spite of the pity that he felt for the many, in attempting to succour whom he could only have jeopardized the few whom he was bound to save; the wonderful influence he exercised over the poor oarsmen, whose long protracted labour postponed to the last possible moment the terrible risk of their landing. The firmness, courage, humanity, wisdom, and presence of mind, of all his preparations for their final tremendous risk, and the authority which he was able to exercise while struggling in the foaming water for his own life and that of the woman and child he was saving, over the man who was proving false to a similar sacred charge,--all these admirable traits are most miserably transmitted to you by my imperfect account; and when I assure you that his own narrative, full as it necessarily was of the details of his own heroism, was as simple, modest, and unpretending, as it was interesting and touching, I am sure you will agree with me that he must be a very rare man. When I spoke with enthusiasm to his old father of his son's noble conduct, and asked him if he was not proud of it, his sole reply was,--'I am glad, madam, my son was not selfish.'

Now, E----, I have often spoken with you and written to you of the disastrous effect of slavery upon the character of the white men implicated in it; many, among themselves, feel and acknowledge it to the fullest extent, and no one more than myself can deplore that any human being I love should be subjected to such baneful influences; but the devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of peremptory command over their fellow men, and under the constant apprehension of danger, and awful necessity of immediate readiness to meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of supreme peril such as this man passed through, saving by their exercise himself and all committed to his charge. I know that the southern men are apt to deny the fact that they do live under an habitual sense of danger; but a slave population, coerced into obedience, though unarmed and half fed, _is_ a threatening source of constant insecurity, and every southern _woman_ to whom I have spoken on the subject, has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves. Happy are such of them as have protectors like J---- C----. Such men will best avoid and best encounter the perils that may assail them from the abject subject, human element, in the control of which their noble faculties are sadly and unworthily employed.

_Wednesday, 17th April._--I rode to-day after breakfast, to Mrs. D----'s, another of my neighbours, who lives full twelve miles off. During the last two miles of my expedition, I had the white sand hillocks and blue line of the Atlantic in view. The house at which I called was a tumble-down barrack of a dwelling in the woods, with a sort of poverty-stricken pretentious air about it, like sundry 'proud planters' dwellings that I have seen. I was received by the sons as well as the lady of the house, and could not but admire the lordly rather than manly indifference, with which these young gentlemen, in gay guard chains and fine attire, played the gallants to me, while filthy, bare-footed half naked negro women brought in refreshments, and stood all the while fanning the cake, and sweetmeats, and their young masters, as if they had been all the same sort of stuff. I felt ashamed for the lads. The conversation turned upon Dr. H----'s trial; for there has been a trial as a matter of form, and an acquittal as a matter of course; and the gentlemen said, upon my expressing some surprise at the latter event, that there could not be found in all Georgia a jury who would convict him, which says but little for the moral sense of 'all Georgia.' From this most painful subject we fell into the Brunswick canal, and thereafter I took my leave and rode home. I met my babies in the wood-wagon, and took S---- up before me, and gave her a good gallop home. Having reached the house with the appetite of a twenty-four miles' ride, I found no preparation for dinner, and not so much as a boiled potato to eat, and the sole reply to my famished and disconsolate exclamations was--'Being that you order none, missis, I not know.' I had forgotten to order my dinner, and my _slaves_, unauthorised, had not ventured to prepare any. Wouldn't a Yankee have said, 'Wal now, you went off so uncommon quick, I kinder guessed you forgot all about dinner,' and have had it all ready for me? But my slaves durst not, and so I fasted till some tea could be got for me.

* * * * *

This was the last letter I wrote from the plantation, and I never returned there, nor ever saw again any of the poor people among whom I lived during this winter, but Jack, once, under sad circumstances. The poor lad's health failed so completely, that his owners humanely brought him to the north, to try what benefit he might derive from the change; but this was before the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill, when touching the soil of the northern states, a slave became free; and such was the apprehension felt lest Jack should be enlightened as to this fact by some philanthropic abolitionist, that he was kept shut up in a high upper room of a large empty house, where even I was not allowed to visit him. I heard at length of his being in Philadelphia; and upon my distinct statement that I considered freeing their slaves the business of the Messrs. ---- themselves, and not mine, I was at length permitted to see him. Poor fellow! coming to the north did not prove to him the delight his eager desire had so often anticipated from it; nor under such circumstances is it perhaps much to be wondered at that he benefited but little by the change,--he died not long after.

I once heard a conversation between Mr. O---- and Mr. K----, the two overseers of the plantation on which I was living, upon the question of taking slaves, servants, necessary attendants, into the northern states; Mr. O---- urged the danger of their being 'got hold of,' i.e., set free by the abolitionists, to which Mr. K---- very pertinently replied, 'Oh, stuff and nonsense, I take care when my wife goes north with the children, to send Lucy with her; _her children are down here, and I defy all the abolitionists in creation to get her to stay north_.' Mr. K---- was an extremely wise man.

APPENDIX

I wrote the following letter after reading several leading articles in the _Times_ newspaper, at the time of the great sensation occasioned by Mrs. Beecher Stowe's novel of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and after the Anti-Slavery Protest which that book induced the women of England to address to those of America, on the subject of the condition of the slaves in the southern states.

My dear E----. I have read the articles in the _Times_ to which you refer, on the subject of the inaccuracy of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's book as a picture of slavery in America, and have ascertained who they were written by. Having done so, I do not think it worth while to send my letter for insertion, because, as that is the tone deliberately taken upon the subject by that paper, my counter statement would not, I imagine, be admitted into its columns. I enclose it to you, as I should like you to see how far from true, according to my experience, the statements of the '_Times'_ Correspondent' are. It is impossible of course to know why it erects itself into an advocate for slavery; and the most charitable conjecture I can form upon the subject is, that the Stafford House demonstration may have been thought likely to wound the sensitive national views of America upon this subject; and the statement put forward by the _Times_, contradicting Mrs. Stowe's picture, may be intended to soothe their irritation at the philanthropic zeal of our lady abolitionists.

Believe me, dear E----,

Yours always truly,

F.A.K.

* * * * *

_Letter to the Editor of the_ 'Times.'

Sir,--As it is not to be supposed that you consciously afford the support of your great influence to misstatements, I request your attention to some remarks I wish to make on an article on a book called 'Uncle Tom's Cabin as it is,' contained in your paper of the 11th. In treating Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's work as an exaggerated picture of the evils of slavery, I beg to assure you that you do her serious injustice:--of the merits of her book as a work of art, I have no desire to speak,--to its power as a most interesting and pathetic story, all England and America can bear witness,--but of its truth and moderation as a representation of the slave system in the United States, I can testify with the experience of an eye witness, having been a resident in the Southern States, and had opportunities of observation such as no one who has not lived on a slave estate can have. It is very true that in reviving the altogether exploded fashion of making the hero of her novel 'the perfect monster that the world ne'er saw,' Mrs. Stowe has laid herself open to fair criticism, and must expect to meet with it from the very opposite taste of the present day; but the ideal excellence of her principal character is no argument at all against the general accuracy of her statements with regard to the evils of slavery;--everything else in her book is not only possible, but probable, and not only probable, but a very faithful representation of the existing facts:--faithful, and not, as you accuse it of being, exaggerated; for, with the exception of the horrible catastrophe, the flogging to death of poor Tom, she has pourtrayed none of the most revolting instances of crime produced by the slave system--with which she might have darkened her picture, without detracting from its perfect truth. Even with respect to the incident of Tom's death, it must not be said that if such an event is possible, it is hardly probable; for this is unfortunately not true. It is not true that the value of the slave as property infallibly protects his life from the passions of his master. It is no new thing for a man's passions to blind him to his most obvious and immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting ones,--in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated machinery of human existence is at once a perpetually renewed cause and effect of certain legal and moral restraints, which, in the shape of government and public opinion, protect the congregated lives and interests of men from the worst outrages of open violence, the natural selfishness of mankind assumes a different development; and the love of power, of pleasure, or of pelf, exhibits different phenomena from those elicited from a savage under the influence of the same passions. The channel in which the energy and activity of modern society inclines more and more to pour itself, is the peaceful one of the pursuit of gain. This is preeminently the case with the two great commercial nations of the earth, England and America;--and in either England or the Northern States of America, the prudential and practical views of life prevail so far, that instances of men sacrificing their money interests at the instigation of rage, revenge, and hatred, will certainly not abound. But the Southern slaveholders are a very different race of men from either Manchester manufacturers or Massachusetts merchants; they are a remnant of barbarism and feudalism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty and danger by the side of the latest and most powerful developement of commercial civilisation.

The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates in the near neighbourhood of their respective cities, are not now the people I refer to. They are softened and enlightened by many influences,--the action of city life itself, where human sympathy, and human respect, stimulated by neighbourhood, produce salutary social restraint, as well as less salutary social cowardice. They travel to the Northern States, and to Europe; and Europe and the Northern States travel to them; and in spite of themselves, their peculiar conditions receive modifications from foreign intercourse. The influence, too, of commercial enterprise, which, in these latter days, is becoming the agent of civilisation all over the earth, affects even the uncommercial residents of the Southern cities, and however cordially they may dislike or despise the mercantile tendencies of Atlantic Americans, or transatlantic Englishmen, their frequent contact with them breaks down some of the barriers of difference between them, and humanises the slaveholder of the great cities into some relation with the spirit of his own times and country. But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the slaveholding population of the South,--a nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp; entrenched within their own boundaries; surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to conceive a more savage existence within the pale of any modern civilisation.

The South Carolinan gentry have been fond of styling themselves the chivalry of the South, and perhaps might not badly represent, in their relations with their dependents, the nobility of France before the purifying hurricane of the Revolution swept the rights of the suzerain and the wrongs of the serf together into one bloody abyss. The planters of the interior of the Southern and South-Western States, with their furious feuds and slaughterous combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the chivalry of France before the horrors of the Jacquerie admonished them that there was a limit even to the endurance of slaves. With such men as these, human life, even when it can be bought or sold in the market for so many dollars, is but little protected by considerations of interest from the effects of any violent passion. There is yet, however, another aspect of the question, which is, that it is sometimes clearly _not_ the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior or superannuated labourers, or the very notorious instance in which some of the owners of sugar plantations stated that they found it better worth their while to _work off_ (i.e. kill with labour) a certain proportion, of their force, and replace them by new hands every seven years, than work them less severely and maintain them in diminished efficiency for an indefinite length of time. Here you will observe a precise estimate of the planter's material interest led to a result which you argue passion itself can never be so blind as to adopt. This was a deliberate economical calculation, openly avowed some years ago by a number of sugar planters in Louisiana. If, instead of accusing Mrs. Stowe of exaggeration, you had brought the same charge against the author of the 'White Slave,' I should not have been surprised; for his book presents some of the most revolting instances of atrocity and crime that the miserable abuse of irresponsible power is capable of producing, and it is by no means written in the spirit of universal humanity which pervades Mrs. Stowe's volumes: but it is not liable to the charge of exaggeration, any more than her less disgusting delineation. The scenes described in the 'White Slave' _do_ occur in the slave States of North America; and in two of the most appalling incidents of the book--the burning alive of the captured runaway, and the hanging without trial of the Vicksburg gamblers--the author of the 'White Slave' has very simply related positive facts of notorious occurrence. To which he might have added, had he seen fit to do so, the instance of a slave who perished in the sea swamps, where he was left bound and naked, a prey to the torture inflicted upon him by the venomous mosquito swarms. My purpose, however, in addressing you was not to enter into a disquisition on either of these publications; but I am not sorry to take this opportunity of bearing witness to the truth of Mrs. Stowe's admirable book, and I have seen what few Englishmen can see--the working of the system in the midst of it.

In reply to your 'Dispassionate Observer,' who went to the South professedly with the purpose of seeing and judging of the state of things for himself, let me tell you that, little as he may be disposed to believe it, his testimony is worth less than nothing; for it is morally impossible for any Englishman going into the Southern States, except as a _resident_, to know anything whatever of the real condition of the slave population. This was the case some years ago, as I experienced, and it is now likely to be more the case than ever; for the institution is not _yet_ approved divine to the perceptions of Englishmen, and the Southerners are as anxious to hide its uglier features from any note-making observer from this side the water, as to present to his admiration and approval such as can by any possibility be made to wear the most distant approach to comeliness.