Part 6

A black man, a slave somewhere in Kentucky, having been sent on a message, mounted on a very valuable horse, seized the opportunity of escaping. He reached Buffalo after many days of hard riding, sold the horse, and escaped beyond the lines into Canada. Here, as in all the British dominions, God be praised! the slave is slave no more, but free, and protected in his freedom.[5] This man acknowledged that he had not been ill treated; he had received some education, and had been a favourite with his master. He gave as a reason for his flight, that he had long wished to marry, but was resolved that his children should not be born slaves. In Canada, a runaway slave is assured of legal protection; but, by an international compact between the United States and our provinces, all felons are mutually surrendered. Against this young man the jury in Kentucky had found a true bill for horse-stealing; as a felon, therefore, he was pursued, and, on the proper legal requisition, arrested; and then lodged in the jail of Niagara, to be given up to his master, who, with an American constable, was in readiness to take him into custody, as soon as the government order should arrive. His case excited a strong interest among the whites, while the coloured population, consisting of many hundreds in the districts of Gore and Niagara, chiefly refugees from the States, were half frantic with excitement. They loudly and openly declared that they would peril their lives to prevent his being carried again across the frontiers, and surrendered to the vengeance of his angry master. Meantime there was some delay about legal forms, and the mayor and several of the inhabitants of the town united in a petition to the governor in his favour. In this petition it was expressly mentioned, that the master of the slave had been heard to avow that his intention was not to give the culprit up to justice, but to make what he called an _example_ of him. Now there had been lately some frightful instances of what the slave proprietors of the south called "making an example;" and the petitioners entreated the governor to interpose, and save the man from a torturing death "under the lash or at the stake." Probably the governor's own humane feelings pleaded even more strongly in behalf of the poor fellow. But it was a case in which he could not act from feeling, or, "to do a great right, do a little wrong." The law was too expressly and distinctly laid down, and his duty as governor was clear and imperative--to give up the felon, although, to have protected the slave, he would, if necessary, have armed the province.

In the mean time the coloured people assembled from the adjacent villages, and among them a great number of their women. The conduct of this black mob, animated and even directed by the females, was really admirable for its good sense, forbearance, and resolution. They were quite unarmed, and declared their intention not to commit any violence against the English law. The culprit, they said, might lie in the jail, till they could raise among them the price of the horse; but if any attempt were made to take him from the prison, and send him across to Lewiston, they would resist it at the hazard of their lives.

The fatal order _did_ at length come; the sheriff with a party of constables prepared to enforce it. The blacks, still unarmed, assembled round the jail, and waited till their comrade, or their brother as they called him, was brought out and placed handcuffed in a cart. They then threw themselves simultaneously on the sheriff's party, and a dreadful scuffle ensued; the artillery men from the little fort, our only military, were called in aid of the civil authorities, and ordered to fire on the assailants. Two blacks were killed, and two or three wounded. In the _melee_ the poor slave escaped, and has not since been retaken, neither was he, I believe, pursued.

But it was the conduct of the women which, on this occasion, excited the strongest surprise and interest. By all those passionate and persuasive arguments that a woman knows so well how to use, whatever be her colour, country, or class, they had prevailed on their husbands, brothers, and lovers to use no arms, to do no illegal violence, but to lose their lives rather than see their comrade taken by force across the lines. They had been most active in the fray, throwing themselves fearlessly between the black men and the whites, who, of course, shrank from injuring them. One woman had seized the sheriff, and held him pinioned in her arms; another, on one of the artillery-men presenting his piece, and swearing that he would shoot her if she did not get out of his way, gave him only one glance of unutterable contempt, and with one hand knocking up his piece, and collaring him with the other, held him in such a manner as to prevent his firing. I was curious to see a mulatto woman who had been foremost in the fray, and whose intelligence and influence had mainly contributed to the success of her people; M----, under pretence of inquiring after a sick child, drove me round to the hovel in which she lived, outside the town. She came out to speak to us. She was a fine creature, apparently about five-and-twenty, with a kindly animated countenance; but the feelings of exasperation and indignation had evidently not yet subsided. She told us, in answer to my close questioning, that she had formerly been a slave in Virginia; that, so far from being ill treated, she had been regarded with especial kindness by the family on whose estate she was born. When she was about sixteen her master died, and it was said that all the slaves on the estate would be sold, and therefore she ran away. "Were you not attached to your mistress?" I asked. "Yes," said she, "I liked my mistress, but I did not like to be sold." I asked her if she was happy here in Canada? She hesitated a moment, and then replied, on my repeating the question, "Yes--that is, I _was_ happy here--but now--I don't know--I thought we were safe _here_--I thought nothing could touch us _here_, on your British ground, but it seems I was mistaken, and if so, I won't stay here--I won't--I won't! I'll go and find some country where they cannot reach us! I'll go to the end of the world, I will!" And as she spoke, her black eyes flashing, she extended her arms, and folded them across her bosom, with an attitude and expression of resolute dignity, which a painter might have studied; and truly the fairest white face I ever looked on never beamed with more of soul and high resolve than hers at that moment.

[Footnote 5: Among the addresses presented to Sir Francis Head in 1836, was one from the coloured inhabitants of this part of the province, signed by four hundred and thirty-one individuals, most of them refugees from the United States, or their descendants.]

* * * * *

NIAGARA IN SUMMER.

Between the town of Queenston and the cataract of Niagara lies the pretty little village of Stamford (close to Lundy Lane, the site of a famous battle in the last war), and celebrated for its fine air. Near it is a beautiful house with its domain, called Stamford Park, built and laid out by a former governor (Sir Peregrine Maitland). It is the only place I saw in Upper Canada combining our ideas of an elegant, well-furnished English villa and ornamented grounds, with some of the grandest and wildest features of the forest scene. It enchanted me altogether. From the lawn before the house, an open glade, commanding a park-like range of broken and undulating ground and wooded valleys, displayed beyond them the wide expanse of Lake Ontario, even the Toronto light-house, at a distance of thirty miles, being frequently visible to the naked eye. By the hostess of this charming seat I was conveyed in a light pony carriage to the hotel at the Falls, and left, with real kindness, to follow my own devices. The moment I was alone, I hurried down to the Table-rock. The body of water was more full and tremendous than in the winter. The spray rose, densely falling again in thick showers, and behind those rolling volumes of vapour the last gleams of the evening light shone in lurid brightness, amid amber and crimson clouds; on the other side, night was rapidly coming on, and all was black, impenetrable gloom, and "boundless contiguity of shade." It was very, very beautiful, and strangely awful too! For now it was late, and as I stood there, lost in a thousand reveries, there was no human being near, no light but that reflected from the leaping, whirling foam; and in spite of the deep-voiced continuous thunder of the cataract, there was such a stillness that I could hear my own heart's pulse throb--or did I mistake feeling for hearing?--so I strayed homewards, or housewards I should say, through the leafy, gloomy, pathways,--wet with the spray, and fairly tired out.

* * * * *

The good people, travellers, describers, poets, and others, who seem to have hunted through the dictionary for words in which to depict these cataracts under every aspect, have never said enough of the rapids above--even for which reason, perhaps, they have struck me the more; not that any words in any language would have prepared me for what I now feel in this wondrous scene. Standing to-day on the banks above the Crescent Fall, near Mr. Street's mill, gazing on the rapids, they left in my fancy two impressions which seldom meet together,--that of the sublime and terrible, and that of the elegant and graceful--like a tiger at play. I could not withdraw my eyes; it was like a fascination.

The verge of the rapids is considerably above the eye; the whole mighty river comes rushing over the brow of a hill, and as you look up, it seems coming down to overwhelm you. Then meeting with the rocks, as it pours down the declivity, it boils and frets like the breakers of the ocean. Huge mounds of water, smooth, transparent, and gleaming like the emerald, or rather like the more delicate hue of the chrysopaz, rise up and bound over some unseen impediment, then break into silver foam, which leaps into the air in the most graceful fantastic forms; and so it rushes on, whirling, boiling, dancing, sparkling along, with a playful impatience, rather than overwhelming fury, rejoicing as if escaped from bondage, rather than raging in angry might,--wildly, magnificently beautiful! The idea, too, of the immediate danger, the consciousness that anything caught within its verge is inevitably hurried to a swift destination, swallowed up, annihilated, thrills the blood; the immensity of the picture, spreading a mile at least each way, and framed in by the interminable forests, adds to the feeling of grandeur; while the giddy, infinite motion of the headlong waters, dancing and leaping, and revelling and roaring, in their mad glee, gave me a sensation of rapturous terror, and at last caused a tension of the nerves in my head, which obliged me to turn away.

The great ocean, when thus agitated by conflicting winds or opposing rocks, is a more tremendous thing, but it is merely tremendous,--it makes us think of our prayers; whereas, while I was looking on these rapids, beauty and terror, and power and joy, were blended, and so thoroughly, that even while I trembled and admired, I could have burst into a wild laugh, and joined the dancing billows in their glorious, fearful mirth,--

Leaping like Bacchanals from rock to rock, Flinging the frantic Thyrsus wild and high!

I shall never see again, or feel again, aught like it--never! I did not think there was an object in nature, animate or inanimate, that could thus overset me!

* * * * *

To-day I accompanied the family of Colonel Delatre to the American side, and dined on Goat Island. Though the various views of the two cataracts be here wonderfully grand and beautiful, and the bridge across the rapids a sort of miracle, as they say, still it is not altogether to be compared to the Canadian shore for picturesque scenery. The Americans have disfigured their share of the rapids with mills and manufactories, and horrid red brick houses, and other unacceptable, unseasonable sights and signs of sordid industry. Worse than all is the round tower, which some profane wretch has erected on the Crescent Fall; it stands there so detestably impudent and _mal-a-propos_,--it is such a signal, yet puny monument of bad taste,--so miserably _mesquin_, and so presumptuous, that I do hope the violated majesty of nature will take the matter in hand, and overwhelm or cast it down the precipice one of these fine days, though indeed a barrel of gunpowder were a shorter if not a surer method. Can you not send us out some Guy Faux, heroically ready to be victimised in the great cause of insulted nature, and no less insulted art? But not to tire you with descriptions of precipices, caves, rocks, woods, and rushing waters, which I can buy here ready made for sixpence, I will only tell you that our party was very pleasant.

The people who have spoken or written of these Falls of Niagara, have surely never done justice to their loveliness, their inexpressible, inconceivable beauty. The feeling of their beauty has become with me a deeper feeling than that of their sublimity. What a scene this evening! What splendour of colour! The emerald and chrysopaz of the transparent waters, the dazzling gleam of the foam, and the snow-white vapour, on which was displayed the most perfect and gigantic iris I ever beheld,--forming not a half, but at least two thirds of an entire circle, one extremity resting on the lesser (or American) Fall, the other in the very lap of the Crescent Fall, spanning perhaps half a mile, perfectly resplendent in hue--so gorgeous, so vivid, and yet so ethereally delicate, and apparently within a few feet of the eye; the vapours rising into the blue heavens at least four hundred feet, three times the height of the Falls, and tinted rose and amber with the evening sun; and over the woods around every possible variety of the richest foliage,--no, nothing was ever so transcendently lovely! The effect, too, was so grandly uniform in its eternal sound and movement: it was quite different from that of those wild, impatient, tumultuous rapids. It soothed, it melted, it composed, rather than excited.

There are no water-fowl now as in the winter--when driven from the ice-bound shores and shallows of the lake, they came up here to seek their food, and sported and wheeled amid the showers of spray. They have returned to their old quiet haunts; sometimes I miss them: they were a beautiful variety in the picture.

* * * * *

BUFFALO.

After an absence of a few days, during which there had raged a perpetual storm, I came back to the Clifton Hotel, to find my beautiful Falls quite spoiled and discoloured. Instead of the soft aquamarine hue, relieved with purest white, a dull dirty brown now imbued the waters. This is owing to the shallowness of Lake Erie, where every storm turns up the muddy bed from the bottom, and discolours the whole river. The spray, instead of hovering in light clouds round and above the cataracts, was beaten down, and rolled in volumes round their base; then by the gusty winds driven along the surface of the river hither and thither, covering everything in the neighbourhood with a small rain. I sat down to draw, and in a moment the paper was wet through. It is as if all had been metamorphosed during my absence--and I feel very disconsolate.

The whole of this district between the two great lakes is superlatively beautiful, and was the first settled district in Upper Canada; it is now the best cultivated. The population is larger in proportion to its extent than that of any other district. In Niagara, and in the neighbouring district of Gore, many fruits come to perfection, which are not found to thrive in other parts of the province, and cargoes of fruit are sent yearly to the cities of Lower Canada, where the climate is much more severe and the winter longer than with us.

On the other side the country is far less beautiful, and they say less fertile, but rich in activity and in population; and there are within the same space at least half a dozen flourishing towns. Our speculating energetic Yankee neighbours, not satisfied with their Manchester, their manufactories, and their furnaces, and their mill "privileges," have opened a railroad from Lewiston to Buffalo, thus connecting Lake Erie with the Erie Canal. On our side, we have the Welland Canal, a magnificent work, of which the province is justly proud; it unites Lake Erie with Lake Ontario.

Yet from the Falls all along the shores of the Lake Erie to the Grand River and far beyond it, the only place we have approaching to a town is Chippewa, just above the rapids, as yet a small village, but lying immediately in the road from the Western States to the Falls. From Buffalo to this place the Americans run a steam-boat daily; they have also planned a suspension bridge across the Niagara river, between Lewiston and Queenston. Another village, Dunnville, on the Grand River, is likely to be the commercial depot of that part of the province; it is situated where the Welland Canal joins Lake Erie.

As the weather continued damp and gloomy, without hope of change, a sudden whim seized me to go to Buffalo for a day or two; so I crossed the turbulent ferry to Manchester, and thence an engine, snorting, shrieking like fifty tortured animals, conveyed us to Tonawando[6], once a little village of Seneca Indians, now rising into a town of some size and importance; and there to my great delight I encountered once more my new friends, Mr. and Mrs. MacMurray, who were on their return from Toronto to the Sault-Sainte-Marie. We proceeded on to Buffalo together, and during the rest of the day had some pleasant opportunities of improving our acquaintance.

Buffalo, as all travel-books will tell you, is a very fine young city, about ten years old, and containing already about twenty thousand inhabitants. There is here the largest and most splendid hotel I have ever seen, except at Frankfort. Long rows of magnificent houses--not of painted wood, but of brick and stone--are rising on every side.

The season is unusually dull and dead, and I hear nothing but complaints around me; but compared to our Canadian shore, all here is bustle, animation, activity. In the port I counted about fifty vessels, sloops, schooners and steam-boats; the crowds of people buying, selling, talking, bawling; the Indians lounging by in their blankets, the men looking so dark, and indifferent, and lazy; the women so busy, care-worn, and eager; and the numbers of sturdy children, squalling, frisking among the feet of busy sailors,--formed altogether a strange and amusing scene.

On board the Michigan steamer, then lying ready for her voyage up the lakes to Chicago, I found all the arrangements magnificent to a degree I could not have anticipated. This is one of three great steam-boats navigating the Upper Lakes, which are from five to seven hundred tons burthen, and there are nearly forty smaller ones coasting Lake Erie, between Buffalo and Detroit, besides schooners.

[Footnote 6: Near this place lived and died the chief Red-jacket, one of the last and greatest specimens of the Indian patriot and warrior.]

* * * * *

THE ENGLISH EMIGRANT.

June 27.

In a strange country much is to be learned by travelling in the public carriages: in Germany and elsewhere I have preferred this mode of conveyance, even when the alternative lay within my choice, and I never had reason to regret it.

The Canadian stage-coaches[7] are like those of the United States, heavy lumbering vehicles, well calculated to live in roads where any decent carriage must needs founder. In one of these I embarked to return to the town of Niagara, thence to pursue my journey westward: a much easier and shorter course had been by the lake steamers; but my object was not haste, nor to see merely sky and water, but to see the country.

In the stage-coach two persons were already seated--an English emigrant and his wife, with whom I quickly made acquaintance after my usual fashion. The circumstances and the story of this man I thought worth noting--not because there was anything uncommon or peculiarly interesting in his case, but simply because his case is that of so many others, while the direct good sense, honesty, and intelligence of the man pleased me exceedingly.

He told me that he had come to America in his own behalf and that of several others of his own class--men who had each a large family and a small capital, who found it difficult to _get on_ and settle their children in England. In his own case, he had been some years ago the only one of his trade in a flourishing country town where he had now fourteen competitors. Six families, in a similar position, had delegated him on a voyage of discovery: it was left to him to decide whether they should settle in the United States or in the Canadas; so leaving his children at school in Long Island, "he was just," to use his own phrase, "taking a turn through the two countries, to look about him and gather information before he decided, and had brought his little wife to see the grand Falls of Niagara, of which he had heard so much in the old country."

As we proceeded, my companion mingled with his acute questions, and his learned calculations on crops and prices of land, certain observations on the beauty of the scenery, and talked of lights and shades and foregrounds, and effects, in very homely, plebeian English, but with so much of real taste and feeling that I was rather astonished, till I found he had been a printseller and frame-maker, which last branch of trade had brought him into contact with artists and amateurs; and he told me, with no little exultation, that among his stock of moveables, he had brought out with him several fine drawings of Prout, Hunt, and even Turner, acquired in his business. He said he had no wish at present to part with these, for it was his intention, wherever he settled, to hang them up in his house, though that house were a log-hut, that his children might have the pleasure of looking at them, and learn to distinguish what is excellent in its kind.