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Title: Historical sketches of the south
Author: Emma Langdon Roche
Release date: October 8, 2025 [eBook #77013]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Knickerboxer Press, 1914
Credits: BlueDiamondHead, Mary Glenn Krause and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE SOUTH ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
Footnotes are moved to the end of the book.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Abaché.]
Historic Sketches of
the South
By
Emma Langdon Roche
_Drawings and Photographs by Author_
The Knickerbocker Press
New York
1914
COPYRIGHT
BY
EMMA LANGDON ROCHE
1914
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY 1
II. EARLY LEGISLATION AGAINST THE SLAVE TRAFFIC 19
III. ILLEGAL TRAFFIC IN SLAVES 49
IV. PREPARATIONS FOR “CLOTILDE’S” VOYAGE 65
V. THE CAPTURE OF THE TARKARS 74
VI. VOYAGE OF THE “CLOTILDE” 84
VII. THE RETURN 92
VIII. THE TARKARS AT DABNEY’S PLANTATION 98
IX. TARKAR LIFE IN AMERICA 103
X. IMPRESSIONS OF ALABAMA IN 1846[1] 129
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ABACHÉ _Frontispiece_
Drawn by Emma Roche.
POLEETE 73
Drawn by Emma Roche.
ABACHÉ AND KAZOOLA 79
MAP DRAWN BY KAZOOLA 89
(_1_) Tarkar Village. (_2_) Dahomey’s Land. (_3_)
Wavering line showing stealthy march of Dahomeyans
through forest. (_4_) Route by which captive
Tarkars were taken to the sea. (_5_), (_6_), (_7_), (_8_),
Eko, Budigree, Adaché, Whydah, towns through
which Tarkars passed. (_9_) River. (_10_) Beach
and sea.
KAZOOLA 97
Drawn by Emma Roche.
WRECK OF THE “CLOTILDE.” 103
CHARLEE 109
OLOUALA 117
Drawn by Emma Roche.
CHARLEE, HEAD OF THE TARKARS 127
Drawn by Emma Roche.
KAZOOLA 131
ZOOMA, THE LAST TARKBAR 139
Historic Sketches of the South
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
To fully understand the opposition of thought wherein our
“irrepressible conflict” had its inception and lay so long in embryo,
to burst forth at last in the awful and bloody travail of a nation
divided and at arms, some knowledge of the history and psychology
of the peoples who settled the American colonies is necessary; for
a nation’s cataclysms are not spontaneously generated, but are the
result of forces which though for generations are silent and hidden
are gathering strength under the evils of superstition, oppression, or
fanaticism, and only need such an explosive as the tongue of a Danton,
Robespierre, Garrison, Beecher, or Stowe to hurl the people into death
and desolation.
The early settlers who have left their impress on American life and
character were of the same country and traditions, but their manners
and ideals had been developed by the opposing forces which began to
stir England during the Renaissance--a hundred and fifty years before
the Reformation--forces of which our own Civil War seems as direct
a sequence as were the religio-political feuds of the 16th and 17th
century England. In the New World the exponents of these contrasting
forces were divided for the first century and a half by what afterwards
became known as Mason’s and Dixon’s Line and by vast areas of
uninhabited wilderness.
Virginia was no Mecca for the religiously or politically oppressed, but
drew to her soldiers of fortune--men impelled by a spirit of adventure,
or those who for some delinquency wished to lose their identity in the
vast, unknown New World; among them were many gentlemen who more often
than not possessed the vices and follies of a corrupt age. The first
who became permanent settlers were divided on the outward voyages by
jealousies and dissensions. These differences were carried into the
colony; aggravated by the greed and selfishness of those placed in
authority, they became greater hardships than the illness, starvation,
and Indian treacheries which hampered early progress. There were “poor
gentlemen, Tradesmen, Servingmen, libertines, and such like, ten times
more fit to spoyle a Commonwealth, than either begin one, or but helpe
to maintain one. For when neither the feare of God, nor the law, nor
shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here, there is
small hope ever to bring one in twenty of them ever to be good there.
Notwithstanding, I confesse divers amongst them, had better mindes and
grew much more industrious than was expected.”[2] Amid treacheries and
deceits, John Smith stands forth a hero. Through his thought and action
the colony not only survived the vicissitudes of fire, starvation, and
massacre, but was saved from itself, for the evils of its own lawless,
disturbing elements were greater dangers than those which came from
without. The hope of gold was ostensibly the colony’s _raison d’être_:
“The worst of all was our gilded refiners with their golden promises
made all men their slaves in hope of recompenses; there was no talke,
no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold,
such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the
sands least they should by their art make gold of his bones.” This
search for gold proved futile; in 1615 the land was parceled off to
each settler in fifty-acre lots, tobacco was planted, and thus began
Virginia’s prosperity.
Tobacco was introduced into Europe by the first Columbian voyagers
and into England by Raleigh and Drake. Despite the strong social and
religious pressure--even King James instituting a propaganda which
led him to write the _Counterblast to Tobacco_--the habit spread with
alarming rapidity, and was not confined to the men alone; chewing
and smoking were indulgences common to the older women, while snuff
was the favorite with the younger ones. This new taste created a
demand which increased Virginia’s population and greatly extended her
cultivated fields. Women were scarce, and the planters growing rich had
a natural desire to return to England. This, however, was obviated by
the importation of widows and virgins who were shipped to the colony
as any other cargo. The nature of this bartering, which is unique in
American history, may best be described from a letter, dated August
21, 1621, which accompanied one of these cargoes of colonial dames:
“We send you in this ship one widow and eleven maids for wives for the
people of Virginia. There hath been especial care had in the choice of
them, for there hath not any one of them been received, but upon good
recommendations.
“In case they can not be presently married, we desire that they be put
in several households that have wives, till they can be provided with
husbands. There are near fifty more which are shortly to come, are sent
by our most honorable lord and treasurer, the Earl of Southampton (the
patron of Shakspere), and certain worthy gentlemen, who taking into
consideration that the plantations can never flourish till families be
planted, and the respects of wives and children fix these people on
the soil, therefore have given this fair beginning for the reimbursing
those charges. It is ordered, that every man that marries them give
one hundred and twenty pounds of the best leaf tobacco for each of them.
“Though we are desirous that the marriage be free according to the law
of nature, yet we would not have these maids deceived and married to
servants, but only to such freemen or tenants as have means to maintain
them. We pray you, therefore to be as a father to them in this business
not enforcing them to marry against their wills.”
Labor for the ever-increasing fields was another problem confronting
the planter. King James decided that the London Company should solve
this by transporting to Virginia English convicts, who thus removed
from old environments and temptations might form a valuable industrial
asset. Only one shipload of a hundred was sent, for about the same
time a Dutch man-of-war arrived at Jamestown (August, 1619) and twenty
negro slaves were sold to the planters. Qualms about such a transaction
could scarcely be expected, for through all historic times it was only
as a slave that the negro had been associated with other races. In
ancient times he had been subservient to the Egyptians, bought for
the Carthaginian galleys; slave to Assyrian, Arabian, Indian, Greek,
Etruscan, and Roman; and in early Christian centuries sold by the
Venetians to the Moors of Spain.[3]
When the existence of new lands became known and labor was needed
for their development, the negro’s native country became a hunting
ground where he was not only stalked by the Dutch and Portuguese,
but by the French and English who also had posts for that purpose in
Africa. In fact the English, including therein the colonists of New
England, became more extensively engaged in the traffic than all other
slave-trading European nations combined. Compunctions about slavery
as about many other things came only with the moral awakening of a
later generation. “Scarcely any one seems to have regarded the trade
as wrong. Theologians had so successfully labored to produce a sense
of the amazing, I might almost say generical, difference between those
who were Christians and those who were not, that to apply to the latter
the principles that were applied to the former, would have been deemed
a glaring paradox. If the condition of the negroes in this world was
altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next
were greatly improved. Besides, it was remembered that, shortly after
the deluge Ham had behaved disrespectfully to his drunken father, and
it was believed that the Almighty had, in consequence, ordained negro
slavery.”[4] The utility of the negro being at once proven, African
slavery had become something of an institution in Virginia, before the
_Mayflower_ with its handful of men, women, and children landed on
Plymouth Rock.
The stern, uncompromising attitude of these people in whom there was
no quibbling with right or wrong as they perceived it, which gave them
the physical courage to endure persecution, mutilation, and even death,
was the result of the religious agitations which began in England with
Wycliffe and were directed against the oppressions and corruptions
which flourished within the Church’s powerful organization. Though
suppressed, the leaven had sifted down to the people who, stultified by
centuries of grossest superstition, had silently and patiently borne
the yoke. In the stirrings of this religious Renaissance the book that
reached them was Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible; this gave to them
the Semitic conception of God--the one God--which the voices of those
“primitive Puritans the Prophets” had saved from the obliterating
dangers of idolatry and superstition. The stolid somberness of the
Northern races responded to the majestic swing of this wonderful
collection of Hebrew documents which traced a people’s struggles and
thought development. Some of its characters as Huxley says of “Jepthah,
Gideon, and Sampson are men of the old heroic stamp, who would look
as much in place in a Norse Saga as where they are.” Stray chapters
sometimes came into the possession of some yeoman who was fortunate
enough to read; in silence and secrecy, when the day’s work was done,
there would gather round him eager listeners. To know what this book’s
message meant to them, one needs but read their subsequent history.
To hear it, possess it, and believe it, they suffered the diabolical
tortures and fiendish perpetrations which at once made martyrs and
tyrants of men, and which laid in England the foundation of what Ranke
calls the “heroic age of Protestantism in Western Europe.” Of this
breed were the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Their inherent independence
had been fostered by a long exile in Leyden; there the old Teutonic
spirit of freedom had survived, and had given her men that sublime
courage and determination, when besieged by the Duke of Alva and
starving, “that rather than yield they would devour their left arms
to enable them to continue the defense with their right.”[5] Leyden
afterwards became a haven for those of other countries who, breaking
from prescribed thought, dared to act accordingly. It was also a
university center; political and religious tenets were subjects of
common debate. Robinson who became one of the Pilgrim fathers took an
active part in these discussions.
To these exiles the New World became a hope. Though homeless, they were
loyal to James. While petitioning the London Company for lands, they
begged of him the freedom to there worship God according to their own
consciences. Though this was not actually granted it was permitted.
An unkindly fate seemed to preside over their voyage--buffeting
storms drove them farther north than their proposed destination; some
historians state they were purposely steered out of their course by
their Dutch pilot, and were forced to land on Plymouth Rock.
By a solemn covenant entered into aboard ship, they agreed that while
they would be faithful to the English Crown, the polity they would
establish among themselves would be an ideal state--a community of
interests--fascinating as expounded by Plato, More, and Rousseau, but
unfeasible for human nature as yet evolved since complete barbarism.
United by a common faith--gloomy, austere--putting aside as mortal
sin all the joys of life--forced to endure together in a wild, bleak,
strange land, starvation, disease, frightful cold, and the terror of
hostile Indians, by whom they would have probably been exterminated
had not a deadly pestilence broken out among these savages--possibly
no better opportunity for such an experiment has ever been offered
civilized man. But among them too was the natural inequality of
individuals which will probably always render futile and unenduring
similar sociological experiments.
The Puritan settlements were gradually augmented by the persecuted from
their native land, and it would seem that they could at last possess
the religious security and contentment for which they had so long
clamored, but dissent had become second nature; combativeness seemed
essential to zeal, and as there was no Established or Roman Church
at which to hurl themselves, their own tenets became mooted points;
bitter differences arose. They showed themselves as intolerant in the
New World as they had been intolerable in the Old, and those without
the might to prove their right were driven forth. In this manner
Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were settled. Much of
their later history has to do with religious bickerings, mutilations,
and witch-burnings. It was an outgrowth of this same spirit which
confronted the South for thirty years before the final rupture which
resulted in the War of Secession.
Thus from the beginning the North and the South were necessarily
distinctive; settled under different circumstances, the one drew
from England the stern, severe, and rigorously religious, while the
other became the habitat for the Puritan’s opposite--the impecunious
gentleman, the roistering cavalier, the insolvent debtor, and the
Catholic nobleman--a class in which there had been a very general
“reversion from virtuous and noble manhood to the lewdness of the
ape and the cunning ferocity of the tiger.”[6] In the New World all
alike were brought face to face with a great, overshadowing nature
which presented the diversified physical conditions along which each
section’s economic development would tend. Agriculture in austere New
England would have been a too uneven wrestling with nature; existence
wrought from the soil meant unending toil and often heart-breaking
disappointment, so the New Englander’s pursuits became mercantile and
seafaring--occupations in which the negro could be of little value, but
following England’s initiative he found the slave-trade profitable, and
the Southern planter a ready buyer. To repress Nature’s exuberance,
the fields of tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and cane required man’s
watchful care, and the negro, inured through all previous generations
to the sun and rain, the jungle and the swamp, properly directed,
became, and still is, the ideal laborer for work of the soil.
Since then our “mental endyses” have been many; we have associations
for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and sympathetic and indignant
thrills pass through us at sight of ill-treatment to one of these, so
we cannot bring our attitude of to-day or of the last hundred years
to judge the beginnings of American slavery. To 16th and 17th century
Europeans it was palpable that the difference between the negro and
the man-like apes was no greater than that existing between the negro
and themselves, and it was debatable “with that brutishness which
commonly appeareth in all their actions whether the people generally
may be thought to be men in the skins of beasts; or beasts created in
the likenesse and shape of man.”[7] The sentimentality which obtained
some years ago and which led to such bitter hatred and seems almost
maudlin when that phase of the question in which the indescribable
wretchedness of the negro in his native land is considered--his gross
and pitiable superstitions, his indifference to death and his regard
for cruelty as a virtue; what slavery did for him seems analogous to
what we suppose primitive man accomplished with the wolf--adopted it
from the wild and made of it a faithful, domestic animal. True, the
motives were utility and gain, but who can deny the mighty uplift in
value and sagacity, both for the dog and the negro? Among the African
tribes described in Pigafetta’s account of Lopez’s _African Travels_
(1598), and spoken of by Heylyn in his _Cosmographie_ (1657), are the
Anziques, “the cruellest Cannibals in the world; for they do not onely
eat their Enemies, but their friends and Kinsfolk. And that they may be
sure not to want these Dainties, they have shambles of man’s flesh, as
in other parts of Beef and Mutton. So covetous withall, that if their
Slaves will yield but a penny more when sold joynt by joynt than if
sold alive, they will cut them out, and sell them upon the shambles.
Yet with these barbarous qualities they have many good ... of so great
fidelity to their masters and to those which trust them, that they
will rather choose to be killed than either abuse the trust, or betray
their Masters. For that cause more esteemed by the Portugals than
other Slaves.” So even the most bloodthirsty possessed potentially the
quality of faithfulness, which when he was removed from his natural
environment--where for thousands of years he had not progressed--made
all his later development possible, and which aside from the cases
where there has been an infusion of white or Indian blood, is largely
responsible for what the best type of American negro is to-day. It was
this quality, fostered by care and kindness, that has filled Southern
tradition with touching and oftentimes heroic incidents of the slave’s
devotion. When the old differences of Puritan and Cavalier, under other
guises, called men to arms, it was to the fidelity of these blacks that
the Southerner trusted wife, children, and home. That this trust was
seldom violated is sufficient encomium for master and slave. Under the
régime established in many places, after emancipation had converted the
“slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperized man” (Huxley), when he
was incited to open rebellion and nameless atrocities, to what sorrows
would the desolated South have been subjected, had the old status
of master and slave been different? Had the South been guilty of the
charges laid to her door, despite Klu-Klux Klans and other precautions,
the negro’s temper would have been much the same as that of the French
canaille, who during the Commune “drank blood to vomit crime.” They had
shown, in the San Domingo insurrections, that revenge lay within their
nature.
CHAPTER II
EARLY LEGISLATION AGAINST SLAVERY
The Cavalier and adventurer in working out their destiny in the New
World became purged of the foibles that continued to debauch their
compeers in England; among their descendants of a few generations were
those men of unimpeachable honor and integrity of purpose who will be
held forever as the highest types of American chivalry and manhood.
Those of Virginia, with whom colonial slavery was most ancient, were
the first to be aroused to the full ethical significance of the
evil--to the grave injustice to the unfortunate lower race, and to
the detriment to the moral nature of the higher. They were the first
to attempt to legislate against the evil. In 1770, Virginia protested
against the importation of slaves, but to no avail as royalty itself
was financially interested in the traffic. At the meeting of the
delegates from each county of Virginia held at Williamsburg in August,
1774, to consider British oppression and indignities, the second
article of the protest resolved and agreed upon bore upon the slave
traffic: “We will neither ourselves import nor purchase any slave, or
slaves, imported by any person, after the first day of November next,
either from Africa, the West Indies, or any other place.” This meeting
was a full one, and among the one hundred and eight signers--all
prominent in Virginia life and annals--are Peyton Randolph, Richard
Henry Lee, George Washington, Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, Thomas
Jefferson, Thomas Marshall, Thomas Randolph, and Francis Lightfoot
Lee. The instructions of Thomas Jefferson, with whom the abolition
of slavery was always a great aim, to the Virginia delegates to the
first Congress (August, 1774), voiced the sentiments of Virginia’s
most thoughtful men: “For the most trifling reason, and sometimes for
no reason at all, His Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary
tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of
desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily introduced in their
infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we
have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa.
Yet our repeated attempts to effect this, by prohibitions, and by
imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition have been hitherto
defeated by His Majesty’s negative; thus preferring the immediate
advantage of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the
American States, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by
this inhuman practise.”
Not only was every effort of the Southern colonists opposed by
England’s monarch, but with the breaking out of open hostilities his
agents were commissioned to arm and instigate the slaves against their
masters.[8] Many lured by the promise of land and freedom flocked to
the British standard; they were sent into Nova Scotia. Suffering from
cold and becoming discontented by the non-fulfillment of the promises
of aggrandizement, they were finally sent to Sierra Leone, which in
the following seventy-five years received the thousands taken by the
British from the slavers.
During this fearful crisis, Virginia’s spirit towards these misguided
people was one of mercy and humanitarianism. At the next convention
it was resolved: “Whereas Lord Dunmore, by his proclamation, dated on
board the ship _William_ off Norfolk, the 7th day of November, 1775,
hath offered freedom to such able-bodied slaves as are willing to
join him, and take up arms against the good people of this colony,
giving encouragement to a general insurrection, which may induce a
necessity of inflicting the severest punishments upon these unhappy
people already deluded by his base and insiduous arts, and whereas,
by an act of the general assembly now in force in this colony, it
is enacted, that all negro, or other slaves, conspiring to rebel or
make insurrection, shall suffer death, and be excluded all benefit of
clergy--we think it proper to declare, that all slaves who have been,
or shall be seduced by his lordship’s proclamation, or others to desert
their masters’ service and take up arms against the inhabitants of
this colony, shall be liable to such punishment as shall hereafter be
directed by the convention. And to the end that all such, who have
taken this unlawful and wicked step, may return in safety, to their
duty, and escape the punishment due their crimes, we hereby promise
pardon to them, surrendering themselves to Colonel William Woodford or
any other commander of our troops, and not appearing in arms after the
publication hereof. And we do further earnestly recommend it to all
humane and benevolent persons in the colony, to explain and make known
this offer of mercy to those unfortunate people.”
About this time, some feeling against American slavery, but more
against the “aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the Southern
colonists,” stirred England, and a general enfranchisement of the
slaves was proposed. Edmund Burke, in his famous speech of March 22,
1775, on the “Conciliation with America,” touches on the incongruity
of such a proposition of freedom coming from England: “Slaves as these
unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery,
must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very
nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their
refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom
from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African
vessel, which is refused entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina,
with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to
see the Guinea captain attempt at the same instant to publish his
proclamation of liberty and to advertise the sale of slaves.”
After throwing off the British yoke, the abolition of the slave traffic
and of slavery was still a paramount issue with these men of Virginia,
and in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had drafted a
clause relative to the moral obliquity; this clause, “reprobating the
enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to
South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the
importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue
it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under
these censures; for though their people had few slaves themselves, yet
they had been very considerable carriers of them to others.”[9]
The disposition to emancipate was strongest in Virginia. In 1778, when
Jefferson introduced a bill into the Assembly to stop the further
importation of slaves either by land or sea--a fine of one thousand
pounds to be imposed upon any transgressor--it was passed without
opposition and temporarily decreased the evil, but the time was not
ripe for so philanthropic an innovation, and the bill was repealed
by a later Assembly. Many of the younger men, however, were imbued
with a realization of the evil, especially those who at William and
Mary’s College, had come under the influence of George Wythe, and it
was to these that many looked for the ultimate righting of the wrong.
Adumbrations of a future catastrophe broke upon Jefferson, but in
that period of patriotism, his almost prophetic vision saw not the
dim, distant conflict as one arising out of the inherent differences
of North and South, though this came to sadden his declining years,
but rather as one of race against race: “Indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep
forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a
revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among
possible events.” The hope of eradicating negro slavery before it took
a too vital hold upon the needs and institutions of his land stirred
his patriotic and spiritual zeal; throughout a long life he took a
vigorous stand against its growth. In 1784, when Virginia gave to the
United States her portion of the Northwest Territory, it was Jefferson,
assisted by Chase and Howell, who drafted and ardently advocated the
ordinance that “after the year 1800 there should be neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in
punishment of crime.” This was defeated, but led to the Ordinance of
1787 which forever excluded slavery from the territory northwest of the
Ohio River.
At the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1787,
Jefferson urged as a step towards the ultimate ending of slavery,
the immediate abolition of the importation, but Pinckney of South
Carolina moved that the traffic be extended until 1808, and he was
seconded by Gorman of Massachusetts. The motion carried in all the New
England States, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland; Virginia,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware were against it. This exigency
of extending it for twenty years was a subject of grave apprehension
to many thoughtful and patriotic men who were slave owners, among them
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison; though the attitude of the last
was frequently ambiguous about many questions, he commits himself very
fully on this clause of the Constitution in _The Federalist_: “It were
doubtless to be wished that the power of prohibiting the importation
of slaves had not been postponed until 1808, or, rather, that it had
been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult
to account either for the restriction on the general government or
for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be
considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period
of twenty years may terminate forever within these States, a traffic
which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern
polity.”
It may be assumed that the majority of those engaged in framing the
Constitution regarded slavery as a domestic problem nearing its
end, and it was a policy which at that time received more vehement
denunciation from men of the South than those of the North, probably
because a part of the North was actively engaged in the traffic and
that the humanitarians of the South, born in the midst of slavery,
were not only awake to the ethical significance of the evil, but were
averse to raising within their midst thousands of an alien race. That
the disposition to discontinue all avenues which led to a continuation
of slavery was not more general was incomprehensible to Jefferson, and
absolutely out of harmony with the spirit of freedom which permeated
American life: “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine
is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death
itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf
to all those motives whose power supported him through trial, and
inflict on his fellow-men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with
more misery, than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
But we must await, with patience, the workings of an over-ruling
Providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of those,
our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full,
when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness,
doubtless, a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by
diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length,
by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things
of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind
fatality.”[10]
This constitutional postponement did not even settle the question
temporarily. The Quakers presented a memorial for the abolition of the
slave trade to the very first Congress (1790). This was reported by a
committee to the whole House; and after various amendments was returned
with the following:
“1st, That migration or importation of such persons, as any of the
States now existing shall think proper to admit, can not be prohibited
by Congress prior to the year 1808.
“2d, That Congress have no authority to interfere in emancipation
of slaves or in the treatment of them within any of the States; it
remaining with the several States alone to provide any regulations
therein, which humanity and true polity may require.”
This was a perilous and critical time--a time of trial for the new
Constitution--when the States, watchful and alert, were jealous
of their rights, and the Quakers’ action was regarded by many as
a flagrant violation of those rights. Washington considered their
petition inopportune, especially as the question had been recently
disposed of and was contained in an article of the Constitution, and
so expressed himself in a letter: “The memorial of the Quakers [and
a very malapropos one it was] has at length been put to sleep, and
will scarcely awake before the year 1808.” However, the Quakers’
attitude was not equivocal, as was that of the Puritan New Englander.
Their petition grew from earnest convictions--convictions which were
deep-rooted before they came to America, for they had expressed their
repugnance to the English slave trade in 1671, and after coming to
America had discouraged participation in slavery as early as 1696; in
1776 they placed their ultimatum upon it by excluding from membership
any Quaker slaveholder.
This constitutional extension of the slave traffic closed
all possibility of the question ever being settled amicably.
Short-sightedness can scarcely be charged to those responsible, for at
that time there was no thought of an acquisition of territory on the
south and southwest, and the cultivation of cotton was still in its
infancy. Before another decade Eli Whitney had invented the cotton-gin;
this gave an impetus to the growing of cotton; agriculture in the
South was revolutionized. To make way for the industry Georgia ceded
her western territory to the United States and a tide of Southern
immigration from the older centers of Virginia and the Carolinas
rapidly flowed into Alabama and Mississippi. The wanderlust of a
hardy, pioneer ancestry was in these men’s veins. Accompanied often
by gentle families, their household goods, and their negroes they
started overland. By long and tedious journeyings, across mountain,
stream, and swamp--through seemingly boundless stretches of majestic
pines--sometimes encountering hostile Indians and again exchanging
friendly courtesies with the friendly Choctaws and Chickasaws, they
reached the new frontier, and established themselves along the river
courses. Others came by sailing vessels, and passing through the French
and Spanish cities of Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans, followed
the river courses into the interior. The log cabins which sprang up
in the wilderness, were soon supplanted by comfortable, substantial
homes frequently built of brick made upon the plantations or of
hand-hewn lumber; each became a nucleus of activities around which all
things necessary for the maintenance of life were produced. On the
well-ordered plantations the African was not only field laborer and
faithful domestic, but became cobbler, mason, carpenter, and a spinner
and weaver of cotton and wool. In this virgin region, far removed
from the life and influences of the older States, there grew up a
vital and mutual dependence between master and slave; as such, each
was necessary to the other; but it was not a combination out of which
sentiments for the ultimate freedom of the negro were apt to grow; and
it was these who were farthest removed from the later machinations
of the Abolitionists, who were most bitter and strenuous in their
opposition. In this close relation which in all but rare exceptions was
a kindly one, the Southerner came to know the negro as the negro then
could not know himself, realized his limitations, directed him along
useful lines, and knew how rapidly he would revert were the civilizing
and humanizing influence of slavery as it existed in the South removed.
In later years when Southerners stood before a questioning world, there
was no sophistry in the protests of those who declared that slavery was
beneficial, and it was an argument resting upon truth that the Southern
negro’s condition was happier than that of the laboring classes in
other parts of the world.
European events also conspired towards an extension of slavery. After
the French troops, already depleted by yellow fever, were defeated by
the negro insurgents at San Domingo, Napoleon realized the uncertainty
of France retaining the great Louisiana Territory which had been
but recently repossessed from Spain. To circumvent the English, who
had long coveted this domain, Napoleon, in 1803, offered it to the
United States for fifteen million dollars. American settlers along
the Mississippi had already experienced difficulties with the Spanish
who claimed complete control of the Mississippi River south of the
Yazoo, and though Congress had been given no constitutional prerogative
for acquiring new territory, Jefferson, who was then President, saw
the varied importance of this acquisition, and successfully and with
very little criticism directed the negotiations. This brought into
the United States, not only a vast terra incognita, but an extensive
Franco-Spanish civilization stretching along the Gulf of Mexico, with
French outposts scattered along the great river systems and reaching
into the very heart of America.
The divergence of this civilization from that of English colonization
was not only racial, but its tone had been qualified by the spirit in
which the settlements had been made and the polity adopted by each. It
possessed nothing of New England’s austerity, or of Virginia’s somewhat
stolid stateliness, but was characterized by a graceful picturesqueness
and a delightful bonhomie. The black-robed priest if not the pathfinder
who blazed the way for French settlements was usually the comrade and
companion of those who did. Religion and settlement went hand in hand.
None of the torturing and enslaving methods used by the Puritans to
force upon the natives a cold, stern religion, unattractive even to
other Christian sects, or by the Spanish in Mexico and Florida, were
resorted to by the French. Wherever there was a priest, Mass began the
day. The mystic ceremony, performed in the dewy freshness of early
morning within the forest’s depths, or on a strip of sandy beach beside
the mighty waters; the solemn gestures of the celebrant and the adoring
attitude of the worshippers appealed to the Indian imagination, and the
French were soon importuned to invoke their Great Spirit to aid the red
man, to bring rain or to heal the sick or wounded.
From Mobile, the oldest and for many years the chief French
settlement, the genius of Iberville and Bienville Lemoyne, aided by
ardent and indefatigable missioners, reached out to remote Indian
tribes, conciliating and binding them as allies. They dealt fairly
with the Indian, but in cases of treachery used the Indian’s own
method of punishment. From the Indians they also adopted the custom of
making slaves of hostile captives. Negro slavery also existed in these
settlements from very early years, for in the quaint baptismal register
of 1704-1778, forming a part of the archives of the Catholic Cathedral
of Mobile, is recorded the baptism of two negro children belonging to
Bienville in 1707, and in the same year a negro woman belonging to him
bore the first negro child born on the Gulf coast.[11]
Gold was not found, nor did the French settlements on the Gulf lay in
the wake of the treasure-ladened Spanish galleons, but the climate was
benign, the lands rich, and the forests afforded an abundance of food,
and in times of scarcity Bienville sometimes quartered his soldiers
among the friendly natives. There was leisure for the amenities,
and the priest and nun who had given up life and ambition in the Old
World were not only the spiritual advisers and educators of the young
of New France, but as missioners guided and instructed the Indian and
the slave. Their institutions became asylums for the sick and desolate
of any race, and to their influence may be traced the easy, happy
condition of the negro slave among the French of Louisiana. There was
that in the temperament of these French which while appropriating the
Indian’s and negro’s usefulness at the same time beguiled and won them.
An incident of a slave’s heroic loyalty to the French is related by
Gayarré in his _Louisiana_. After the French settlements passed under
Spanish control, New Orleans revolted, and the leaders were sentenced
to be shot; Jeannot the negro hangman cut off his right arm rather than
raise it against a Frenchman.
In March, 1724, Bienville issued a code, one clause of which forbade
marriages between whites and blacks. Such marriages had taken place,
and had given rise to what afterwards became an extensive Afro-Latin
population. In many places along the Gulf coast it is among these
so-called Creoles who have clung to their original habitations along
the river banks, the creeks, and bays, that the old French names are
found and a patois spoken. The result of this amalgamation did not seem
mongrel, but distinctive, and in their local history, covering two
hundred years, during which time they have lived under five different
flags, there has been a pride of race which has kept the original
strain pure. Deeply religious, they have been characterized by honesty,
frugality, and industry. They were never slaves, but were in many
instances slave owners.
A Société des Amis des Noirs had been formed in Paris, in 1788. Its
object was to end the slave trade and slavery, especially in San
Domingo from which came many reports of cruelty and oppression. A
little later, France in establishing the rights and equality of man
passed through her awful revolution. Though Louisiana was in constant
touch and sympathy with France, among her peaceful, pleasure-loving
people no sentiment about negro freedom or equality seems to have been
evolved. When this great territory passed into the United States, it
carried with it its institution of slavery, which, established as it
was in the habits and thoughts of these people, strengthened slavery’s
hold upon the South, pushed further away, and complicated with added
difficulties the fulfillment of the hope of those great Southerners who
had looked for its gradual and peaceful termination. In the government
of this new territory we again meet with the large vision of Jefferson
and his desire to curtail slavery. Outside importations were forbidden,
and only slaves who had been brought to this country before 1798
could be carried by their masters for the purpose of settlement into
Louisiana. All others carried in would be freed and the penalty for
each offense would be three hundred dollars.
To prepare the seafaring interests for the statute of 1808, and to lead
American sentiment to its acceptance, Congress in the early part of
the same year (1803) prohibited after April 1, 1803, the importation
of any persons of color, or the entry of any vessels containing such
persons into those States whose laws already debarred such importation.
Indians were not included in this prohibition. The penalty for the
first violation was a fine of one thousand dollars for every such
person, one half to be appropriated to the United States and the other
to be given to the informer. For the latter offense, the vessel and
all appurtenances were to be confiscated by the United States, one
half the net proceeds to be given to such “person or persons on whose
information the seizure of such forfeiture shall be made.”[12]
When New Jersey abolished slavery in 1804, this statute obtained in
all the Northern States. In their economy slavery was an incubus. This
statute imposed no financial sacrifice on individuals, for in most
cases the relatively few slaves had been transferred and sold in the
South. Though there were threatening party differences, as yet there
seems no general feeling against slavery in those States to which
it was peculiar, and such sentiments as were entertained were more
abstract than those common in the South itself.[13] Many Northern
fortunes had been built upon the slave trade; though prohibiting the
importation into their own States, numbers were still actively engaged
in the traffic--and the Southern States were the only ports legally
open to them, for an act forbidding the direct or indirect importation
of slaves into foreign countries had become a United States statute
in 1794. The South itself seldom engaged in this traffic--it was a
degradation to which her aristocratic tendencies could not stoop; a
“nigger-trade” was taboo; and though slave vessels plied to and from
her ports, they were usually a part of Yankee enterprise.
Jefferson, to whom the question had so long been a momentous one,
welcomed the time when the traffic would end, and in his sixth annual
message to Congress, December 2, 1806, rejoiced “on the approach of
the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally,
to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further
participation in those violations of human rights which have so long
continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the
morality, the reputation, and the best interests of the country have
long been eager to proscribe.” With the first of January, 1808, it
became unlawful for any person of color to be imported into the United
States or her territory; any person aiding or abetting such traffic to
be fined five thousand dollars; also “any citizen of the United States,
building, fitting out, equipping, loading or otherwise preparing
or sending away any ship or vessel, knowing that the same shall be
employed in such trade or business” shall pay twenty thousand dollars,
a part to go to the United States and another to any person or persons
who shall prosecute the offender. Every vessel found engaged in the
traffic was to be “seized, prosecuted, and condemned in any of the
circuit courts or district courts where the said ship or vessel may
be found or seized.” The President was authorized to use the naval
and revenue forces to enforce the statute. They were to cruise on the
coast of the United States and her territories; to seize and bring to
port vessels contravening the provisions of the act, the captain or
commander to be prosecuted before any court of the United States having
jurisdiction thereof; and if convicted to be fined not more than ten
thousand dollars, and to be subject to imprisonment to not more than
four years.[14]
These and further enactments of a like nature ended constitutionally
the slave traffic in the United States. Many New Englanders had nothing
further to gain; there was no legitimate financial emolument now
standing between them and a realization of the ethical side of the
slave question. Instead of lending a conservative help to those of the
South who hoped by gradual and conciliatory methods to loose slavery’s
growing hold upon their institutions, through a curious psychological
metamorphosis they began to look askance upon the South and its
institution of slavery, and to affiliate in thought with the abolition
movement which under Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others was stirring
England; forgetting in their zeal that the wrongs which Clarkson and
Wilberforce were championing were the wrongs of which England and
New England as slave traders had been the chief perpetrators. This
growing sentiment was seized upon by politicians and played upon for
party purposes. It was with increased apprehension that they saw the
extension of the slave interests which the purchase of Louisiana had
necessitated, and the further representation these interests would
be given as new States were formed from the slave territory. For a
decade this jealousy was kept within safe bounds by any preponderance
of representation being checkmated and balanced by the formation of a
Free State. Yet this feeling was becoming rapidly contagious, spreading
to many who had not previously thought of slavery, or who regarded it
as a domestic policy to be settled by the Slave States individually
and exclusively. With the development of the Missouri controversy,
the temperamental divergence born of several centuries of turmoil and
turbulence in England, and too deep-rooted to be really dead, roused
from the anesthesia of united effort against a common enemy and a
subsequent enthusiasm for Union, and stood forth definitely defined
as North and South. Forgetful of the give and take necessary for
the harmonious existence of polities as of individuals, the country
was still not large enough or the political interests sufficiently
varied, for such differences to be conducive to well-being. In his
Presidential farewell Washington warned his countrymen against a
geographical division of interests: “In contemplating the causes which
may disturb our Union, it occurs as a matter of serious concern, that
any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by
_geographical discrimination_, ... northern and southern ... Atlantic
and western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that
there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the
expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is
to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot
shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings
which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien
to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal
affection.” To Jefferson, aged and waiting, this Missouri controversy
and its adjustment, was the alarum in which he heard the death-knell
of the Union, and in a letter to John Holmes, dated Monticello, April
22, 1820, he so expresses himself: “I thank you, dear sir, for the copy
you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents
on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had
for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to
public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a
passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not far distant. But
this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and
filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the death-knell of
the Union. It is hushed indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve
only, not the final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a
marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to
the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new
irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious
truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than
I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practical
way. The cession of that kind of property (for so it is misnamed) is
a bagatelle, which would not cost me a second thought, if in that
way a general emancipation and _expatriation_ could be effected; and
gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is,
we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely
let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.
Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one Free
State to another would not make a slave of a single human being who
would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface
would make them individually happier, and proportionately facilitate
the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on
a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence, too, from this act
of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of
Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of
men comprising a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every
State, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them, and
given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say that
the non-freemen of Connecticut could be freemen, or that they shall not
emigrate to another State?
“I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice
of themselves of the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and
happiness to their country, is to be thrown away, by the unwise and
unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be
that I shall not live to weep over it. If they would dispassionately
weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle,
more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause
before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of
treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful
advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and
respect.”
CHAPTER III
ILLEGAL TRAFFIC IN SLAVES
Legislation against habits which by an evolution of sentiment have
become moral issues is always followed by flagrant violations, for
men are usually loth to acquiesce in things which they consider a
curtailment of their livelihood. For a century and a half, the slave
traffic had been an immense source of revenue for a large class of
citizens. Despite the constitutional prohibition, the imposition of
heavy fines and the offer of large rewards, the traffic in negroes
continued to flourish--nor was it carried on with any great degree of
surreptitiousness. Vessels intended for this purpose were built with a
reference to speed and were probably the fleetest craft afloat.
In the early years of the Union the revenue and naval forces were
necessarily small and the coast a vast and sparsely inhabited one.
Algerian pirates called for a part of their strength, and their
energies were again directed against the British in 1812; pirates
harassed commerce off the South Atlantic States and in the Gulf of
Mexico--Lafitte establishing a kingdom at Barataria, an island in the
lower Mississippi, from which sailed many piratical expeditions, and
where a brisk trade in slaves was carried on. Though our naval force
seemed inadequate it had been singularly successful against these
outside adversaries. These preoccupations seem scarcely sufficient
excuse for the flourishing condition of the illegal traffic in slaves.
Money, politics, and indifference appear to have been a trinity that
glossed over rottenness then as now. Obscure harbors and lonely shores
were not always the destination of these hell-craft, but they sailed
to and from the principal seaport towns. With scarcely an exception
they were fitted up by New Englanders and New Yorkers and manned by
down-east seamen; Rhode Island led with Connecticut, Massachusetts
and New York as close seconds. The West Indies and Brazil offered a
market, and some found their way into Southern ports, where, through
the co-operation of an equally criminal class of Southerners, the
unfortunate, contraband humans were sold.
While the middle passage before 1808 was a veritable inferno, it was
afterwards characterized by a barbarity which should have sickened
the soul of all humanity, yet the voice and sentiment of humane,
law-abiding Americans were not strong enough to make this traffic
impossible. Cyrus King in a speech on the Missouri Question, in 1819,
described the shameless situation: “It well might be supposed that the
slave trade would in practice be extinguished; that virtuous men would
by their abhorrence stay its polluted march and the wicked would be
overawed by its potent punishment, but unfortunately the case is far
otherwise. We have but melancholy proofs from unquestionable sources
that it is still carried on with all the implacable ferocity--and
insatiable rapacity--of former times. Avarice has grown more subtile
in its evasions; and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite
quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American
citizens are steeped up to their very mouths (I scarcely use too bold a
figure) in this stream of iniquity? They throng the coasts of Africa
under the stained flags of Spain and Portugal, sometimes selling abroad
their ‘cargoes of despair,’ and sometimes bringing them into some of
our Southern ports, and there, under the forms of law, defeating the
purpose of the law itself, and legalizing their inhuman but profitable
adventures.”
Those so unfortunate as to have been brought into any of the Southern
States were by the Constitution “subject to any regulations, not
contravening the provisions of the act, which the legislatures of the
several states or territories at any time hereafter may make, for
disposing of any such negro, mulatto, or person of color.” As some
extenuation for those Southern States, let it be asked, What was to
be done with these unfortunate Africans? Barbarians all--often of the
lowest type--and sometimes cannibals--could they be given freedom? The
attention of thinking men was early directed to the status of the free
black; how to place him to his own best advantage that his position
as a citizen would not be equivocal; and to avoid arousing by his
idle example or designing machinations, discord, dissatisfaction,
and even mutiny among the slaves. In 1803, a colonization plan was
discussed in the Virginia Assembly; this led to a correspondence on
the subject between Madison, who was then Governor, and President
Jefferson. Out of this was born in 1816, what soon became a very active
organization, the American Colonization Society. After negotiations,
lands were secured on the west coast of Africa at Cape Mesurada. There
the society established a colony to which such free blacks as desired
might be conveyed, and which was also to receive the Africans taken
from slavers, or those found to have been smuggled into the country
by traders. During all the years of the society’s activities the
unfortunates reached by their clemency were small in proportion to
those surreptitiously sold into bondage; this was due to the powerful
abettors--often legalized ones--of the traffic. A lack of intelligent
forethought was responsible for disheartening results in their early
efforts at colonization. But the society’s efforts at home were
more successful by fostering a spirit against the trade, and it was
instrumental in regulating the laws in some of the Southern States
which were so ambiguous as to aid rather than crush the trade.[15] In
1819, Congress stipulated that contraband Africans were to be taken
from State jurisdiction to become wards of the Government, and the
President was authorized to make “such regulations and arrangements
as he may deem expedient for the safe-keeping, support, and removal
beyond the limits of the United States, of all such negroes, mulattoes,
or persons of color, as may be so delivered and brought within their
jurisdiction. And to appoint a proper person or persons, residing upon
the coast of Africa, as agent or agents for receiving negroes, etc.,
delivered from on board vessels, seized in the prosecution of trade
by commanders of the United States armed vessels.” In 1819, Congress
acting upon a memorial presented by the Colonization Society, declared
the slave traffic to be piracy punishable with death. In this same
year the statute of 1809 was enlarged and made more stringent and the
President was empowered to send armed vessels along the African coast.
One hundred thousand dollars was appropriated for this purpose.
Rigid legislation only multiplied the horrors, without curtailing the
evil. With death as the penalty, when there was danger of apprehension,
it was not uncommon for the whole cargo to be thrown into the sea.
This, compared with the tortures of frequent passages, was almost
humane. To escape the terrors, numbers would embrace death if given the
opportunity. Yet the trade was highly profitable even if three out of
four cargoes were lost.
By the Treaty of Ghent (1815), the United States and Great Britain
agreed separately and individually to use their influence to suppress
the trade. Yet later the United States threw sheltering arms around
those of her citizens whom Britain had reason to suspect--maritime
rights, the statement that Southern slave owners might make voyages
accompanied by their slaves, or the plea of slave hands on merchant
ships--often protected malefactors. After Parliament abolished slavery
from the British colonies, the American brig _Comet_ was stranded off
the Bahamas (1830), as was the _Encomium_ in 1834 and the _Enterprise_
in 1835; slaves were found aboard in each case and liberated by the
English. Americans raised a loud cry. After a correspondence covering
nearly ten years Great Britain agreed to pay for the Africans, and
admonished her colonies on the southern borders of the United States to
“maintain good neighborhood.” As the years went by and all so-called
efforts proved ineffectual, England, with a sincere desire to end the
traffic, developed an assumption that it was her especial privilege,
and inaugurated a right of search, or visit, against the very nature
of which it was imperative that the United States should protest. In
many cases this necessity became unavoidably another protection for
malefactors. As the flags of various countries were constantly used
to cover the traffic, England in 1803 united with Russia, France,
Austria, and Prussia for the suppression, and acquired supervision
along the African coast, maintaining a right of search. America was
not approached on this subject, though Lord Palmerston boldly declared
to the world England’s right to “visit” American merchantmen (Aug.
13, 1841). This was later sustained by Lord Aberdeen (Oct. 13, 1841).
America’s attitude toward the situation was awaited with great interest
by European Powers. Such an assumption could not be tolerated--America
had already suffered too much from British assumption--and President
Tyler in his message to Congress protested that “however desirous the
United States may be for the suppression of the slave trade, they
cannot consent to any interpolations of the maritime code at the mere
will and pleasure of other governments. We deny the right of any such
interpolation to any one, or all the nations of earth without our
consent.... American citizens prosecuting a lawful commerce on the
African seas, under the flag of their country, are not responsible
for the abuse or unlawful use of that flag by others; nor can they
rightfully, on account of any such alleged abuses, be interrupted,
molested, or detained while in the ocean; and if thus molested and
detained while pursuing honest voyages in the usual way and violating
no laws themselves, they are unquestionably entitled to indemnity.”[16]
Lord Aberdeen in his correspondence with Mr. Stephenson (Oct. 13,
1841) had admitted that it would be an infringement of public law,
to visit and search American vessels during times of peace, if that
right were not granted by treaty. “But no such right is asserted. We
sincerely desire to respect the vessels of the United States, but we
may reasonably expect to know what it is we respect. Doubtless the flag
is prima facie evidence of nationality of the vessel; and, if this
evidence were in its nature conclusive and irrefragible, it ought to
preclude all further inquiry. But it is sufficiently notorious that
the flags of all nations are liable to be assumed by those who have no
right or title to bear them. Mr. Stephenson himself fully admits the
extent to which the American flag has been employed for the purpose
of covering this infamous traffic. The undersigned joins with Mr.
Stephenson in deeply lamenting the evil; and he agrees with him in
thinking the United States ought not to be considered responsible for
the abuse of their flag. But if all inquiry be resisted, even when
carried no further than to ascertain the nationality of the vessel, and
impunity be claimed for the most lawless and desperate of mankind,
in the commission of the fraud the undersigned greatly fears that it
may be regarded as something like an assumption of that responsibility
which has been deprecated by Mr. Stephenson....
“The undersigned, although with pain, must add, that if such visit lead
to the proof of the American origin of the vessel, and that she was
avowedly engaged in the trade, exhibiting manacles, fetters, and other
usual implements of torture, or had even a number of those unfortunates
on board, no British officer could interfere further. He might give
information to the cruisers of the United States, but it could not be
in his power to arrest or impede the prosecution of the voyage and the
success of the undertaking.”
The question called for a diplomatic correspondence. In 1842, Lord
Ashburton was sent as special minister to the United States, empowered
to settle the Northwest Boundary, and other questions of controversy.
The result of his conference with Daniel Webster, Secretary of State,
was a treaty between Great Britain and the United States known as the
Ashburton Treaty and as the Treaty of Washington. By the eighth article
each stipulated to “maintain on the African coast an adequate squadron,
to carry in all not less than eighty guns, to enforce separately and
respectively the laws, rights, and obligations of the two countries for
the suppression of the slave trade.”
There was also the realization that as long as certain countries
offered open markets for slaves, the temptation to malefactors would
be so great that their efforts would be more or less ineffectual; by
the ninth article both countries agreed to “unite in all becoming
representations and remonstrances with any and all powers within whose
dominions such markets are allowed to exist,” and that “they will urge
upon all such powers the propriety and duty of closing such markets
effectually, at once and forever.”
Americans, among others, continued to brazenly carry on the trade; as
the gap between the North and the South widened, it was carried on with
renewed vigor. The Abolitionists’ thoughts were focused on conditions
in the South, and failed to note the flourishing trade carried on
under their very eyes from the ports of New England and New York.
Inhabitants of these places were constantly being found implicated,
but by lack of proof, or through some technicality, they were seldom
convicted. Officials, who were either conniving or indifferent, aided
them in their lucrative trade. As late as 1858, a brisk trade was
carried on; statistics show that in that year eighty-five slavers were
fitted out and sailed from New York alone, and these successfully
captured and sold into slavery fifteen thousand Africans. Sometimes
they were sent into the South. The schooner _Wanderer_ in the fall
of 1858 surreptitiously landed three hundred at Brunswick, Georgia;
they were taken up the Savannah River and sold. In October, of the
same year, an alleged slave bark, _Isle de Cuba_, was taken in custody
at Boston, and her crew held as witnesses under a thousand-dollar
bond; later they and Captain Dobson were discharged. In November,
the schooner _Madison_ was taken by the United States marshal at New
York. She was intended for the slave trade, was sold at auction, and
bought in for Eddy & Gardener of Salem, Mass., for sixteen hundred
dollars. Evidence pointed that she was bound for Salem to be fitted
out as a slaver when captured. In September the _Echo_ was captured
by a revenue cutter and taken to Charleston as the nearest port;
Charleston was very active in her efforts to restrain the trade. The
_Echo_ was commanded by Captain Townsend of Rhode Island--the queen of
the slave-trading States. The Africans were cared for at Charleston
until the Colonization Society could take charge of them. They were
the wildest barbarians--men and women were alike nude, though this was
no evidence that they had been accustomed to going so in their native
land, as their clothes were usually taken from them by their captors.
Some of the charitable ladies provided clothing for them. Among all
these unfortunates there was but one article of clothing--a glove--and
this was worn with great pride and distinction by a tall, handsome
negress. Hoop-skirts were then in vogue, and this woman was dressed by
the ladies in full regalia. Entranced, she danced and shrieked with
delight, pushing the hoop-skirt on one side to see it stick out on the
other.
Many violations might be cited. Sometimes ships reported deserted
vessels on the high seas--vessels whose manacles and wooden spoons
told a gruesome tragedy. An article in the New York _World_, in 1859,
described some of the methods by which the slavers escaped punishment:
“The slave trader takes care to cross the ocean without a national
flag or purpose of any kind. The reason for this is that if captured,
no court can condemn them for piracy. The vessels may be condemned and
the negroes liberated by the captor, but the crew can be punished only
by the nation under whose flag the offense was committed. No flag, the
crew escapes.” Slavers no longer left America with manacles, gewgaws,
and fire-water, but carried money. Once on the African coast they
could buy from English or other vessels the articles needed for trade.
The bargain struck, the crew that made the outward voyage was usually
discharged, and a new one of adventurous spirit procured on the African
coast.
Thirteen years after the ratification of the Ashburton Treaty, when
England made reclamations on the Brazilian Government for innumerable
violations of her treaties, the reply of the Emperor was “if Great
Britain would find the real culprits, she must go to the ports of
Boston and New York to find them.”[17]
CHAPTER IV
PREPARATIONS FOR CLOTILDE’S VOYAGE
In 1858, Mobile had been for almost a century and a half one of the
important Gulf coast ports. Picturesquely situated at the head of
a lagoon-like bay, the craft of many nations dropped anchor in her
waters. Somewhat past the heyday of youth, her buildings mellowed by
time and her streets shaded by trees, she wore an air that was calm
and comfortable, and her homes and public buildings bespoke a settled
prosperity. Survivors of primitive and pioneer life might be seen
about the streets; some Indians lingered on and with baskets strapped
across their shoulders sold _filé_ and sassafras about the streets,
while white-covered “Chickasaha” wagons, drawn by from six to twenty
oxen, came slowly and laboriously down Spring Hill and St. Stephen’s
roads, bringing staples from the interior to the Mobile markets. The
district near the river and towards the northern part of the town was
given over to commerce and occupied by cotton warehouses--low-lying,
monotonous structures of brick. The river boats carried on a brisk
trade and Mobile’s export to foreign countries was large. Life about
the wharves which was usually busy--and often gay--became very
stirring during the latter part of 1858 and 1859. It drew upon itself
the attention of the United States Government, elicited a special
proclamation from the President, and a vigilant watch by United States
officials.
In the early fifties, during one of Nicaragua’s chronic revolutions,
General Walker had been invited by the democrats of Leon to unite
with them against the aristocrats of Granada. Many Alabamians joined
him in this expedition and shed their blood for the cause. Walker
gained supreme power, but his glory was short-lived. The opposing
forces united and compelled him to leave. In 1857, President Buchanan
recognized him as President of Nicaragua, and addressed him as such.
His adventurous exploit met with general acclamation. But when Walker
announced that Nicaragua would be open to Southern colonization,
admitting slaves, it was like flaunting a red rag before a maddened
populace; the abolitionism of the North, already unrestrained in its
fanaticism and jealous hatred, backed by Northern commercialism caused
a rapid reversion of feeling. Walker, the erstwhile hero, was denounced
as a filibuster, and Southerners were accused of attempting to
establish a Southern Republic along the Gulf of Mexico that they might
spread slavery and reopen the slave traffic.
In 1858, Walker prepared to make good his previous claims. The
collectors of the ports of New Orleans and Mobile were ordered not to
clear vessels for Nicaraguan ports, before first communicating with the
Government of Washington. Vessels carrying passengers and receiving
every protection of the Government still sailed from Eastern ports to
San Juan del Norte. Mobile and New Orleans felt the trade of the South
to be seriously crippled by this discrimination. In a special message,
the President denounced the “leaders of former illegal expeditions who
had expressed their intention of open hostilities against Nicaragua,”
and particularly against one “who is now at Mobile, which has been
designated as the rendezvous and place of departure for San Juan del
Norte.” He enjoined all the Government officers, “civil and military,
to be active, vigilant, and faithful in suppressing these illegal
enterprises.” This message was received with indignation throughout
the whole of the lower South. Mobilians gathered in groups about the
streets and on the new post-office steps, and excitedly discussed
the President’s proclamation. They were in sympathy with Walker and
many were contributing funds towards the expedition. Espousal of his
cause became an issue in the mayoral election. Further excitement
was generated by the attitude of Judge Campbell, his charge to the
grand jury, and his emphasis of the President’s order for officials
to be “vigilant, active, and faithful.” Citizens regarded this as
espionage and as a personal affront to their fellow townsman, Robert H.
Smith, collector of the port. The discovery of a Government spy--one
General Wilson from Ohio--and a minion of Judge Campbell--who was
seen “sneaking about the wharves and warehouses of the city, to find
something contraband of Abolition interest and Abolition policy,”
provoked the citizens to further anger. “As a next step we shall
have our servants paid to report the words which drop from us at the
table.”[18]
Rebellion was already rampant in the South. The temperament of Southern
men was unfailingly daring--adventure appealed to their imaginations
and risk was a game to be played. In the midst of this excitement,
an expedition was preparing, money was being contributed, and the
schooner _Susan_ fitted out. Harry Maury, socially and financially
prominent, was in command. When ready to sail she was refused clearing
papers, but Maury weighed anchor and sailed down the bay, preparatory
to joining the fleet. The revenue cutter _McClelland_ pursued, brought
her to, and boarded her and demanded her papers. Maury said he did not
expect to receive them until he reached the fleet. The captain of the
_McClelland_ then claimed the _Susan_ as a prize for the Government;
Maury refused to consider her as such. Lieutenant White was placed
aboard with orders to take her to Dog River Bar and to hold her there
as prize. Maury nonchalantly replied that he did not object to White
remaining aboard as his guest. The next day both vessels sailed about
the bay, but the captain, under orders from the custom-house at Mobile,
warned Maury that if he attempted to sail away the _Susan_ would be
sunk. At dark the captain ordered both boats to drop anchor for the
night. About eleven o’clock, a heavy mist arose, the _Susan_ weighed
anchor and slipped noiselessly away, carrying aboard Lieutenant
White. The _Mobile Register_, voicing the sentiments of the citizens,
wished for the voyage “that the breezes be prosperous and the fates
propitious.” When two hundred miles out in the Gulf, Lieutenant White
was transferred to the bark _Oregon_ and sent back to New Orleans,
where he stated that he had received every courtesy while aboard the
_Susan_. He reported that she carried besides her crew, two hundred and
forty men, Minie balls, and Mississippi rifles. The _Susan_ was wrecked
on a coral reef off Honduras. The subsequent adventures of her men is a
thrilling narrative. They were received by the governor of Bay Island,
who upon hearing of their predicament sent them back to Mobile in Her
Majesty’s steam-sloop _Basilisk_.
With the birth and fruition of such adventures, Mobile’s river-front
naturally became an exciting place. About this time a group of men were
one day standing on the wharf discussing the efforts the Government
was finally making to suppress the slave trade, the vigilance which
was being exerted, and the impossibility for a vessel equipped for
such a purpose to evade officials. There was some betting--a favorite
pastime of the day--and Captain Tim Meaher, a steamboat builder and
river-man, who was standing near, wagered that he could send a slaver
to the coast of Africa and bring through the port of Mobile a cargo of
slaves. The wager was taken up and the stakes were large. This is the
tradition which is given in connection with the _Clotilde’s_ voyage.
It may have been true or it may have been invented to give color and
palliation to what proved to be the last cargo of slaves brought into
the United States, but it is certain that this was only one of the
voyages made under the auspices of the Meahers and Captain Foster. Of
these there are still rumors among the older people, and the widow of
Captain Foster, innocent and trustful, hoped until her recent death to
get from the United States about thirty thousand dollars which would
have been Foster’s share in the _Gipsy_--a slaver which with her cargo
was captured by Government officials and which was valued by those
interested in her at four hundred thousand dollars.
There were three of the Meaher brothers--Tim, Jim, and Burns. They
were natives of Maine, and possessed the New England love of the
water and taste for the slave trade. Captain Foster was born in Nova
Scotia of English parentage. His people were all seafaring--sailors,
captains, and builders of boats--and possibly his proclivities were
also inherited. These men were interested in a mill and a ship-yard at
the mouth of Chickasabogue, three miles above Mobile. The _Clotilde_,
the _Susan_, the _Gipsy_, and other boats which were engaged in the
river trade, in filibustering expeditions, the slave trade, and as
blockade-runners during the Civil War were built there. The _Clotilde_,
because of her fleetness, was selected to make the voyage to the slave
coast. She was the personal property of Foster and had been designed
and built by him.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Poleete.]
Once arriving on the African coast there was little trouble in
procuring a cargo of slaves, for it had long been a part of the
traders’ policy to instigate the tribes against each other and in this
manner keep the markets stocked. News of the trade was often published
in the papers. The Meahers and Foster could have sought nothing more
enlightening or to their purpose than an item published in the _Mobile
Register_, November 9, 1858: “From the west coast of Africa we have
advice dated September 21st. The quarreling of the tribes on Sierra
Leone River rendered the aspect of things very unsatisfactory. The King
of Dahomey was driving a brisk trade in slaves at from fifty to sixty
dollars apiece at Whydah. Immense numbers of negroes were collected
along the coast for export.” Foster, with a crew of northern men,
sailed directly for Whydah.
CHAPTER V
THE CAPTURE OF THE TARKARS
The slaves who constituted the _Clotilde’s_ cargo and who have become
historic by being the last brought into the United States were captured
by Dahomey’s warriors and Amazons on one of their cruel excursions. For
many years the tribe of Dahomey had been a scourge to the weaker and
more peaceable tribes whose domains lay near the Gold Coast or in the
interior away from the coast of Guinea. Cruel, stealthy war was their
occupation--a war of surprise which aroused sleeping villages to the
horrors of fire, plunder, and capture. The older victims were usually
killed. Sometimes they were permitted to live and to see their young
and strong overpowered, bound, and led into captivity--a captivity
from which there could be no hope of return, for the prisoners were
conveyed to the coast, sold to the slavers, and carried across the
sea to strange, alien lands. The King of Dahomey’s house was built
of skulls and his drinking cups were the skulls of fallen chiefs. In
the early part of the nineteenth century one of the Dahomey kings
organized a battalion of women warriors--a race rare in history but not
especially unique in African annals. Early cosmographies record of the
King of Inhamban: “It is affirmed that he hath a strong battalion of
Amazons, a warlike race of women who inhabit about the Lake of Zambre,
and the outskirts of Zanzibar; compared by some for their fidelity and
prowess to the Turkish Janizaries.”[19] Like the Greek Amazons those
of Inhamban and Dahomey were recruited by incursions upon neighboring
tribes.
The Tarkar village was situated many miles inland. Poleete, one of
the old survivors, says it was “many days from the water,” meaning
thereby the sea. They were a peace-loving, agricultural people,
raising hogs, sheep, and cows, and planting corn, beans, and yams.
Their chief industry was the production of palm oil. Nature had been
lavish--the lands were wonderfully fertile, requiring little work and
no fertilizer; the fragrance of ripening fruits filled the forests.
The Tarkar dwellings were of superior quality and had the advantage of
withstanding fire. They were built of mud; the process of construction
has been described by two of the survivors--Poleete and Kazoola. First
a circular trench was dug and a wall of mud four feet high and a foot
and a half thick laid; this was left until thoroughly dry. Another four
feet was laid upon this, which was also left to dry. Then a third layer
of four feet was laid making their dwellings about twelve feet high.
When thoroughly dry, branches were cut, the roof thatched and covered
with mud.
The Tarkars were not without laws, and had a sort of court of justice
over which the King presided. Each of the old survivors lays especial
stress upon honesty as a tribal characteristic. Stealing was almost
unknown; all worked and had what was needed; houses were never locked
and possessions seldom disturbed. All an individual’s wealth “might be
hung upon a tree or accidentally left--others of the tribe knew they
had not put it there--that it was not theirs--so disturbed it not.”
“Suppose I had left my purse in town in the public square. To-day I
have not the time to go for it--nor to-morrow--am I worried? No, for
I know when I go I will find it where I left it. Could you do that in
America?” (Kazoola). As there was no reason or excuse for stealing,
when one among them committed a theft, it was more through a spirit of
braggadocio. The culprit would be taken before the King who would say,
“You are strong--you have two arms to work--you suffer for nothing--why
have you stolen?” The defendant would be imprisoned, and the Tarkars
say that if he lived to get out he would steal no more.
Death was always meted to the murderer--rank having no weight with
justice. Poleete explained that if the King’s son committed murder,
death would fall to him as to the commoner. “Money don’t plea you
there” (Poleete). The manner of execution was decapitation--the
implement a sword. To illustrate the inexorable nature of their laws,
the following was narrated by Kazoola: “The Law in Tarkar. If it would
be my son. He kills a man. I have money--I want to buy my son. I go
before the King, and say ‘Oh, King, my son has killed, but I have
money.’ The King would reply, ‘Here is the Law, read.’ I read and say,
‘Yes, King, the Law says Death.’ And the King would answer, ‘That is
the Law, and I am the King. Shut your eyes, give up your son--money
cannot buy.’”
The Tarkars were polygamists, sometimes having as many as three wives,
but never any more. The conditions of life were so easy they could
afford the luxury. There was no need to support the wives, for the
women had the same amount of property as the men and did the same
work. Jealousy among the wives was unknown; the first wife selected
the second and the second the third, etc. This custom has been lucidly
explained by Kazoola and Olouala. “Kazoola has been married about
three years. His wife says, ‘Kazoola, I am growing old--I am tired--I
will bring you another wife.’ Before speaking thus, she has already
one in mind--some maid who attracts her and who Kazoola has possibly
never seen. The wife goes out and finds the maid--possibly in the
marketplace--and asks, ‘You know Kazoola?’ The maid answers, ‘I have
heard of him.’ The wife then says, ‘Kazoola is good--he is kind--I
would like you to be his wife.’ The maid answers, ‘Come with me to
my parents.’ They go together; questions are exchanged and if these are
satisfactory, the parents say, ‘We give our girl into your keeping--she
is ours no more--be good to her.’” The wife and the maid return
together to Kazoola’s house. The wife introduces the maid to Kazoola,
shows her how to look after things as she has done, then sits down to
take her days of rest and works no more. The relation of the husband
to the wives was that of protector. Once married, a man dared not look
upon women other than his wives, for the punishment was very great. To
justify their native custom of polygamy, the Christianized Tarkars now
cite the example of David and Solomon.
[Illustration: Abaché and Kazoola.]
They believed in the spirits of departed relatives; to these the
“day was as night and the night as the day.” To these spirits their
actions were known. The Tarkars also possessed dualistic ideas of a
future life. There was a Spirit of Good--Ahla-ahra, to whom by doing
right their actual, daily life would be something of a consecration;
and there was a Spirit of Evil--Ahla-bady-oleelay. “Do right and you
will go to Ahla-ahra; do wrong, you go to Ahla-bady-oleelay.” While
not exactly Nature-worshipers, they were Nature-fearers; they did not
propitiate by prayer or any kind of ceremonial these Spirits of Good
and Evil, but believed their powers were manifested in the wind, the
cloud that covered the sun, and in the thunder and the lightning.
Before these last the Tarkars trembled, and were filled with fear; they
would cross their arms over their breasts and cowering, cry out, “We
will be good!”
“In Africa different places, like Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans--each
have a different tribe speaking a different language. Suppose the tribe
at New Orleans comes to the one at Mobile and says, ‘You have fruit
and corn and cattle--you must give me half.’ You at Mobile say, ‘No,
go back and raise your own cattle and corn.’ And they say, ‘If you do
not give us cattle and corn, we will make war on you.’ They go back to
their own country and talk among themselves. ‘You know that tribe at
Mobile. We demanded half their crops and cattle--they refused; we will
make war upon them. But they have strong soldiers. We will go through
the country, surround the village at the break of day.’”[20] Thus did
the Dahomeyans plan their attack upon the Tarkars. One morning just
at the break of day, the fiends of Dahomey--and the female warriors
were the most cruel--broke upon the unsuspecting Tarkars. Some of the
men were already astir and had gone into the fields to work while the
day was yet cool. These were all killed; had one escaped he would
have aroused the sleeping village, and the women and small children
might have made their escape. They were aroused from slumber and in a
few minutes death or captivity was upon them; even the infants were
torn from their mothers’ breasts and carried away. Those who were
not killed were overpowered. Dahomey’s Amazons vanquished the most
stalwart men and bound them as captives. The Tarkars relate that in
their paint and war clothes Dahomey’s women soldiers could not be
distinguished from the men. The Dahomeyans cut off the heads of their
dead victims, leaving the bodies where they had fallen. The heads
were to be taken home as evidence of individual valor and as trophies
to be hung on the Dahomey huts. Human faces could express no more
anguish than those of the old Tarkars when they speak of this awful
experience. One of the trials and tragedies of their march to the coast
was the dangling heads of their relatives and friends. When these grew
offensive the Dahomeyans stopped the march that they might smoke the
heads. As they passed near one of Dahomey’s villages, at a curve in
the big road, they caught sight of fresh heads raised on poles above
the huts and of skulls, grinning white. With the captives there were
some people of other tribes--friends who had been visiting in the
Tarkar village--Tarkbar, Goombardi, Filanee, and Ejasha. (These tribal
names are spelled as pronounced by the surviving Tarkars.) Kazoola
has drawn a map of the route taken by Dahomey and of the march to the
sea, which he claims any of his tribe would recognize. The towns they
passed through on their march to the sea were Eko, Budigree (Badragy?),
Adaché, and Whydah. This last the Tarkars sometimes call Gréfé. There
they remember a white house on the river-bank; behind this was a
stockade wherein they were held prisoners about three weeks, at the end
of which time Captain Foster came.
CHAPTER VI
THE VOYAGE
Captain Foster boarded at the Vanderslice home (afterwards marrying
one of the daughters) in the Meaher settlement. This was about three
miles from Mobile and a mile from the ship-yard at the mouth of
Chickasabogue. When starting for Africa, he left home by night, slung
his bag of gold across his shoulder, and went alone through the woods
to the river where the _Clotilde_ lay. He pulled out a part of the
cabin bulk-head and concealed his gold behind it. He then picked up
his crew, got under way, and passed out of the Gulf of Mexico without
incident or mishap. When on the Atlantic he was alarmed to find by
the stars that the _Clotilde_ was drifting out of her course. He knew
no cause, and she continued to drift. One night he lay on his bunk,
sleepless and wondering. Like an inspiration the thought came that
the hidden gold was too near the compass. He arose, moved the gold,
and the needle swung into position. A terrific hurricane blew him to
the Cape Verde Islands, where he had to stop for repairs. The crew
mutinied. They threatened that if he did not promise more pay, they
would inform the officials of the purpose of his voyage. Foster did
not hesitate to comply, for promises cost nothing and he sometimes
found it unnecessary to keep them. His wife in relating this incident
remarked that the captain had always said that “promises were like
pie-crust--made to be broken.” He made friends with the Portuguese
officials and the United States Consul, and as a part of his policy
presented handsome shawls and ornaments to their wives. These had been
bought in Mobile and stowed away to be used in such emergencies. No
questions were asked Foster. The repairs finished, he sailed away. He
arrived safely in the Gulf of Guinea and had to anchor more than a mile
out and be taken ashore in a small boat which was built to cut through
the surf. When about to pass through a breaker, a warning would be
given to Foster to hold his nose. On reaching shore he was placed in
a hammock and conveyed by six stalwart blacks to the presence of a
prince of Dahomey--a great, stout black, weighing over three hundred
pounds. This prince was hospitable in his attentions and entertained
Foster with the sights of Whydah. One which he did not relish was a
large square enclosure in which were thousands of snakes. Walking among
these creatures was both trying and disgusting. They were kept for
religious ceremonials.
This prince wished to make a present to Foster, so asked him to select
for himself a native--one that the “superior wisdom and exalted taste”
of Foster designated the finest specimen. Gumpa was his choice, Foster
making this selection with the intention of flattering the prince to
whom Gumpa was nearly related. This accounts for the presence of one
of Dahomey’s tribe in the African settlement near Mobile. He became
known as African Peter and was a conspicuous figure in the life of the
settlement. He used to tell his story in the simple phrase, “My people
sold me and your people bought me.”
After many hospitalities, Foster was taken to the stockade where the
Tarkars were imprisoned. They were placed in circles composed of ten
men or ten women, Foster standing in the middle. This was another trial
for the unfortunates, and Kazoola says, in language which any one could
understand, “He looka, an’ looka, an’ looka. Then he point to one.” The
one indicated would be taken out of the circle and placed to one side;
then Foster would point to another, who would be placed with the one
already selected. Foster picked out one hundred and thirty, after which
he got into the hammock and was conveyed across the river to the beach.
Behind him marched the Tarkars, chained one behind the other. They had
to wade, the water coming up to their necks. On the beach they had
their first view of the sea, and the realization that they had to go
out into it was another horror. They wore clothes made of cotton--the
same they had worn when captured--but as they stepped into the small
boats which were to take them to the _Clotilde_, the Dahomeyans, always
vicious and avaricious, tore their garments from them, saying “You go
where you can get plenty of clothes.” Men and women alike were left
entirely nude, and this fact is still a humiliation to the Tarkars.
They regard the accusations of some American negroes that they were a
naked people as a great indignity.
As the Tarkars were taken aboard the _Clotilde_, they were put into
the hole. In this respect the _Clotilde_ was better equipped than most
slavers; the usual space in which the “middle passage” was made was
from two and a half to three feet in height, and the miserable captives
were stowed away much as sardines are packed in cans, without even room
to sit up. The hole of the _Clotilde_ was deep enough to permit of the
men of lesser stature to stand erect. The top of the hole was shut down
and the Tarkars were left in darkness to grieve and wonder.
When a hundred and sixteen had been brought aboard, Foster went up into
the rigging with his glasses to look about the harbor. He saw that all
of Dahomey’s vessels were flying black flags. He hurried down and gave
orders to leave all slaves who were not yet aboard; to weigh anchor and
to get immediately under way. The treacherous Dahomeyans dealt also
in piracy, and were making ready to bear down upon the _Clotilde_,
recapture the slaves, and take Foster and the crew prisoners. The
_Clotilde_ made her escape. When out some miles, the _Clotilde_ was
sighted by an English cruiser. The slaver was a small craft, and Foster
by using a favorite tactic--an elusive tacking--evaded the English.
Once in the wake of the trade-winds the _Clotilde_ sailed towards her
destination at a lively speed.
[Illustration: =Map Drawn by Kazoola.=
(_1_) Tarkar Village. (_2_) Dahomey’s Land. (_3_) Wavering line showing
stealthy march of Dahomeyans through forest. (_4_) Route by which
captive Tarkars were taken to the sea. (_5_), (_6_), (_7_), (_8_), Eko,
Budigree, Adaché, Whydah, towns through which Tarkars passed. (_9_)
River. (_10_) Beach and sea.]
At the end of the thirteenth day the Africans were removed from their
close, dark quarters. Their limbs were so cramped and numbed they
refused to obey their wills, so they were supported by some of the
crew and walked around the deck until the use of their limbs returned.
Tottering on deck, to their astonished, terror-stricken eyes the sea
stretched all around them: “We looka, an’ looka, an’ looka--nothin’ but
sky and water. Whar we com’ from, we do not know--whar we go, we do not
know” (Kazoola). One day they saw islands. The Tarkars say that on the
twentieth day, Foster seemed uneasy; that he always had his glasses to
his eyes; that he climbed the mast, and looked for a long time; then he
came hurriedly down, ordered the sails down, threw out the anchors,
and ordered the Tarkars back into the hole. Thus the _Clotilde_ lay
until night.
The Tarkars were naturally close observers; during the voyage they seem
to have been particularly alert. They noted the varying colors of the
sea--how at first it was blue, then green and how they passed through
water that seemed blood-red. Foster was kind to them. They could eat
the food--hunger makes anything palatable. Though their mental anguish
was great, they suffered physically only for water. About a gill was
given them at morning and at evening, and this tasted of vinegar.
During such voyages, it was necessary that the water be conserved.
Their only relief came when they caught rain in their parched hands and
mouths.
When the _Clotilde_ sailed into American waters, the Africans were
put into the hole--there to remain until relief came in capture or a
successful landing. Three days before they landed, when the _Clotilde_
lay waiting behind the islands in Mississippi Sound and near the lower
end of Mobile Bay, a bunch of green boughs was brought to them to show
that the voyage was almost at an end.
To make the hiding more secure, the _Clotilde_ was dismasted. Then
Foster got into a small boat, rowed by four sailors to go to the
western shore of Mobile Bay, intending to send word to Meaher that the
_Clotilde_ had arrived. His approach was regarded with suspicion by
some men ashore, and he was fired upon. Waving a white handkerchief
their doubts were allayed and he offered fifty dollars for a conveyance
which would take him to Mobile.
CHAPTER VII
THE RETURN
The time of waiting had been an anxious one. The Meahers realized
the risk. There had always been some, but during the absence of the
_Clotilde_ great agitation had become rife throughout the country,
and one of the things the Government had at last undertaken to do was
to wipe out at once and forever the illegal traffic in slaves. The
destination and purpose of the _Clotilde_ had been noised about, and
Meaher realized that officials were watching his movements. Aside from
the _Clotilde’s_ capture, he had little to fear, for every vestige of
the conservatism which had so long held in restraint the abolitionism
of the North and the temper of the South had disappeared; the two
sections had drifted so far apart as to be virtually two countries;
war clouds were looming large upon the horizon and differences had
gone so far there could be no reconciliation. Garrison’s voice was
ringing through the North characterizing Southerners as “thieves and
robbers, men-stealers, and women-whippers” and calling loudly, “how
can two walk together, except they agree? The slaveholder with his
hands dripping in blood--will I make a compact with him? The man who
plunders cradles--will I say to him ‘Brother, let us walk together in
unity?’ The man who to gratify his lust or his anger, scourges women
with the lash till the soil is red with blood--will I say to him, ‘Give
me your hand; let us form a glorious union?’” Charges which were as
a scourge to Southerners; goaded and angered, many began to talk of
reopening the slave traffic. The question was agitated in Congress--a
number of papers advocating it, not all of which were of the South.
The New York _Day Book_, May 17, 1859, came out strongly for it. “Of
course no one can suppose we doubt the right of bringing negroes from
Africa if they are needed. It is simply a question of expediency, and
there can be no doubt our laws making it piracy must be blotted out
of the Statute Books. They are not only ridiculous, but utterly and
wholly contemptible,” etc. From the point of view of a large class
of Southerners these arguments were not fallacious. Yet they were
retrogressive and their revival put the South out of harmony with
ethical and intellectual progress, and defeated the hopes of those of
larger vision. Early in 1859 the Mobile papers lent their support to
the question. Mobilians, like all of the South, were tried to their
utmost, and Meaher knew if all due secrecy was observed, he had little
to fear from them.
Captain Foster reached Mobile on a Sunday morning in August (1859)
with the secret that the _Clotilde_ lay behind the islands in
Mississippi Sound. Arrangements had long been made that a tug should
lie in readiness to go at a moment’s notice down Mobile Bay to tow
the _Clotilde_ and her cargo to safety. When the news came, the tug’s
pilot was attending service at St. John’s Church. Captain Jim Meaher
and James Dennison--a negro slave--hurried to the church. Dennison
remained outside while Meaher went in to call the pilot. The three
hastened down to the wharf, and were soon aboard the tug _Billy Jones_,
steaming rapidly down the bay. Late afternoon found them nearing
the _Clotilde_, but they waited for the darkness. The most dangerous
part of the adventure was still ahead--the trip up Mobile Bay. At
the mouth the marshes and islands offered protection; if they could
once reach the delta of the Mobile River, with its desolate stretches
of marsh, its deep rivers and intricate bayous, safety was almost
assured. But the bay lay smilingly open between two long arms of land.
Her wonderful beauty under the gorgeous August sunset was lost upon
the watchers; they prayed for the light to fade and for mysterious
night with its enshrouding darkness. At last as if loath to die, the
color was gone; sea and sky melted together into almost impenetrable
grayness. They ceased their vigils and fell to a quick activity; lines
were thrown, the _Clotilde_ made fast, and the trip up the bay was
begun. Her wooded shores had echoed the voices of many peoples and the
sounds from many craft, but never any more epoch-making--those from
the last slave ship--the voyage nearing its finish which ended forever
among Anglo-Saxon people the darkest blot upon their civilization.
The chugging sound of the tug’s machinery filled the Tarkars with
terrified wonder; at last they concluded that it was the swarming of
bees.
Time was precious and the darkness doubly so; much was still to be done
before day with its light should come. These hours might mean life or
death. The trip up the bay was safely made. The tug avoided the Mobile
River channel, slipped behind the light-house on Battery Gladden,
into Spanish River. This lay in the midst of the marsh and with its
circuitous windings was not more than ten miles long. As the _Clotilde_
passed opposite Mobile the clock in the old Spanish tower struck
eleven, and the watchman’s voice floated over the city and across the
marshes, “Eleven o’clock and all’s well.”
The _Clotilde_ was taken directly to Twelve-Mile Island--a lonely,
weird place by night. There the _R. B. Tainey_[21] waited; lights were
smothered, and in the darkness quickly and quietly the _Clotilde’s_
cargo of one hundred and sixteen negroes was transferred to the
steamboat, taken up the Alabama River to John Dabney’s plantation below
Mount Vernon and not far from the shadow of the fort, where they were
landed before noon of the next day.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Kazoola.]
At Twelve-Mile Island the crew of Northern sailors again mutinied.
Captain Foster, with a six shooter in each hand, went among them,
discharged them, and ordered them to “hit the grit and never be seen in
Southern waters again.” They were placed aboard the tug. Meaher bought
tickets and saw that they boarded a train for the North. The _Clotilde_
was scuttled and fired, Captain Foster himself placed seven cords of
light wood upon her. Her hull still lies in the marsh at the mouth of
Bayou Corne and may be seen at low tide. Foster afterwards regretted
her destruction as she was worth more than the ten Africans given him
by the Meahers as his booty.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TARKARS AT DABNEY’S PLANTATION
Dabney’s plantation lay in the cane brake country--a part of the river
region, so-called from the miles of towering cane. It was a wilderness,
every part strangely alike, in which even those most familiar with
it could be easily lost. Here, according to the narrative of James
Dennison, the slave who was left in charge and who afterwards married
Kanko--one of their number--and of the surviving Tarkars, they were
kept for eleven days, but in a state of constant change, being
transferred each day from one part of the swamp to another. They were
allowed to speak only in whispers, for there was a chance that some
one passing on the river might hear strange voices. At the end of the
eleventh day clothes were brought to them and they were put aboard the
steamer _Commodore_ and carried to The Bend in Clark County, where
the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers meet and where Burns Meaher had a
plantation.
There they were lodged each night under a wagon shed, and driven each
morning before daybreak back into the swamp, where they remained until
dark. Understanding no word and knowing not what was expected of them,
they were made to know the driver’s wishes by a shooing sound--such
as would drive chickens or geese. In this strange land, among strange
faces and an unknown tongue, the Tarkars say that at first they almost
grieved themselves to death.
Meaher sent word secretly to those disposed to buy. They were piloted
to the place of concealment by Jim Dennison. The Africans were placed
in two long rows, the women on one side and the men on the other--the
buyers standing between, and carefully examining them--even looking
at their teeth. Those selected would be put to one side, and when the
purchaser was ready to depart, he would make his ownership known to
them by waving his hand around the group selected, then bringing it to
his breast. The Tarkars could not understand these transactions--they
only knew their numbers were gradually growing less. Day after day they
saw some of their kinsmen or comrades led away--to what fate they knew
not. Some were sold and taken to Selma. Of their march through the
woods one pathetic and picturesque incident has come to me. As they
marched through the strange land--tired, dejected, friendless--knowing
not where they were going or what would be their destiny--a circus,
moving from place to place, chanced to pass along the country road.
To avoid danger or suspicion, the Africans were concealed behind the
bushes with their backs to the passing show. As it passed, one of the
elephants trumpeted; joy transformed the Tarkars, spread over their
features, and ran through their limbs. To them the sound was as a cry
from home, and as with one voice, gesticulating, tears streaming from
their eyes, they shouted: “Elé, Elé! Argenacou, Argenacou!” (“Home,
Home! Elephant, Elephant!”) Of this small band--two still live--a man
and wife--and those of the tribe near Mobile still receive news of them
now and then.
As time passed and the Tarkars continued inconsolable, Captain Tim
Meaher recommended that they be put to some kind of work. They look
back upon this as the first happy episode of their life in the new
land. When they were taken into the fields for the first time, their
astonishment was very great when they saw civilization’s agricultural
methods. “We astonish to see the mule behind the plow to pull”
(Kazoola). The contrast in fertility made them feel that the American
soil was accursed and their own blessed. There they had but to scratch
the top soil and whatever they planted grew; but in America there
was nothing but “work, work, work.” The Tarkar would stand for no
mistreatment. Once an overseer attempted something which the women
considered as such and he was overpowered by them and given a sound
thrashing. Naturally of agricultural and industrious habits they soon
came to understand Southern crops and were very successful in raising
corn, cotton, beans, peas, cane, pumpkins, etc. This experience was of
great advantage to them when they were afterwards thrown upon their own
resources. Their homes to-day are characterized by excellent gardens
and many varieties of fruit trees.
After war was declared there was little danger of exposure, and the
Africans belonging to Foster, to Jim and Tim Meaher were taken to the
Meaher settlement, at what is known to-day as Magazine Point, where
they were kindly treated by their respective owners. Those left at
Burns Meaher’s plantation tell of great hardship. When they first
arrived they were given one pair of shoes and never any more. Before
daybreak they were sent to the fields to work and kept hard at it until
night, when they returned home by torchlight. After the surrender,
these joined the others of their tribe at Magazine Point.
[Illustration: Wreck of the “Clotilde.”]
CHAPTER IX
TARKAR LIFE IN AMERICA
Magazine Point--the site of Meaher’s mill and ship-yard--though but
three miles from Mobile, was inaccessible, except by water or a
circuitous route of some miles by land. Between the two places lay an
impenetrable swamp and forest. Red clay hills rolled away from the
northern border of this jungle, diversifying the strip of country
between Three Mile Creek and Chickasabogue. This extensive area was
known as Meaher’s hummock and was thickly wooded by a suburb forest
of native trees--pine, cypress, bays, magnolias, beech, junipers,
gums, and oaks. These had sheltered the goings and comings of many
peoples. This place had been beloved by the Indians; some still
lingered on among what the Tarkars called the “high trees,” living
in their pine-bark tepees. During the Spanish régime it had been
included in the grant of land known as the St. Louis tract, and Dr.
Charles Mohr points out in his _Plant Life in Alabama_ that it must
have been a feeding place for migratory birds, for tropical plants are
found there which are not known to other parts of the coast. Near the
mouth of Chickasabogue, overlooking the river, there is a prehistoric
shell-mound, overgrown by patriarchal live-oaks, hundreds of years old,
and on this the Tarkars had their first dwellings. Much has been told
and written by casual visitors of the queer rites and superstitions of
“Africa-Town”--the little cluster of huts which have long since been
abandoned--none of which is substantiated by fact or by the actual
knowledge of those who have known and appreciated the Tarkars. But
nothing has been told of the other superstitions with which this region
fairly reeks.
Until the saw-mills became so active there were old beeches near
Chickasabogue and Hog Bayou, bearing seventeenth, eighteenth, and
early nineteenth century dates and curious signs which substantiated
the belief of the credulous and imaginative that through this district
there was much hidden treasure--treasure buried by early adventurers,
by the pirates, and in later times by members of the Copeland gang--and
safely guarded by the spirits of those who had concealed it. Though
this tract is now largely cleared and settled, these traditions and
ghost stories are still told and believed by the negroes, creoles, and
ignorant whites. Poinquinette, an old creole fisherman and a repository
of interesting lore, has related some of his personal encounters with
the Magazine Point ghosts, and so real are they to him, and so vivid
his narrative, that his listeners are thrilled with a sort of belief.
By a dream it was once made known to him and several companions
(Nelson, Sales, Moody, Ebernezar Fisher, and a man named Robinson)
that there was a treasure buried just below Turner & Oats’s mill. The
spot was thickly wooded--high trees and low shrubs--yet not so dense
that they could not see about them--even a bird was visible as it flew
through the brush. They went early one Friday morning and began digging
at seven o’clock. Almost as soon as their spades touched the earth, the
woods began to resound with voices--child voices--and they wondered
where children’s voices could come from, but went on with their
digging. As the excavation progressed, the sounds came nearer--there
were calling and crying and hissing--until finally the voices were
right at them and surrounding them. They could hear the voices but
could see nothing. Then the voices passed by them with a whirr and back
again into the bushes where they were still heard. By this time the
hole was some ten feet deep. Nelson Sales, who had had more experience
with spirits than the others, offered to go back into the woods and
talk to the voices. He was confronted by a fearful apparition--a great
blue bull with eyes of fire and a tail as large as a hogshead. It
dashed passed him, charged across the hole, and as it went over threw
all the earth back, completely filling the excavation. They were all
thoroughly frightened and would not go back until they could get the
negress Clara Randall, from Charleston. Poinquinette was loud in his
praises of this woman, who could see and talk to spirits and was not
afraid of them.
She built a tent and camped alone for three days and nights at the
scene of their labor. She set a table, provided with milk from a white
cow, wine, and honey--inveigling the invisible ones and tempting them
by food to give up the secret of the buried treasure. At the end of
the third day her persuasions prevailed, and the spirits reluctantly
made known the place. Next morning she walked to the spot and placed
her foot where the men should dig. They fell to work and had not dug
more than twenty minutes, before the top of the treasure-box was
uncovered. They rapidly cleared the earth from around it and there lay
before their eager wondering eyes a cedar chest which measured five
feet in length, two and a half feet wide, and two and a half feet deep.
It contained three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold, and
Ebernezar Fisher, over-zealous and over-anxious, bored two holes in it
with an auger. While he was boring the second, the woman warned him to
stop--that the spirits were regretting their revelation--but Ebernezar,
who was of stubborn temperament, bored on unheedful of her warning. It
was a bright day--not a cloud in the sky--the sunlight filtered through
the trees and fell in strong beams upon the auger. The other men,
standing to one side, watched it glinting on the steel. Again the woman
warned Fisher, and as she spoke his arm was wrenched from the auger.
Almost at the same instant a black cloud swept across the sky, an awful
gust of wind bent the great trees until they looked as if they would
break, a crash of thunder and a blinding flash of lightning and the
box disappeared! Then all was clear and bright again. It was a spirit
storm--purely local, and seen only by the searchers after treasure.
“Then all of us had to come away like sick cats and with aching hearts,
because we hated to see a treasure like that disappear. It’s there
somewhere to-day--and wherever it is, Ebernezar Fisher’s auger is still
sticking in it.”
Another time they received intimation that they should go to Meaher’s
hummock and hunt a mound and some trees bearing marks like an inverted
E; then walk so many feet in a certain direction and dig. On this
occasion they took old Adam Boone, a negro who was supposed to have
found many hidden treasures. They found the marked trees and the mound,
which was six or seven feet high and looked as if it had been built
by man. They had just arrived, identified the spot, and were grouped
around it talking. Ebernezar Fisher, who was tall, stood with the butt
of his gun resting on the ground, and held it with one hand near the
end of the barrel. Both hammers were down. Old Adam Smith was saying,
“I’ve been hearin’ of this place a long time. They say several men were
killed and buried here.” As the last words were uttered, one barrel of
Fisher’s gun went off, and he was so startled that he threw it from
him; Charlie Tell who was sitting on the ground near him caught it
and as he did so the other barrel went off. Needless to add that the
seekers for gold left the spot as quickly as they could and have never
gone back again.
[Illustration: Charlee.]
There are places in the woods and among the hills where no one can
go--unless very brave and then not to stay long--for there are sounds
as of the march of soldiers, the clank of their swords, and the orders
of the captains. Whoever goes to these places will have to fight the
spirits and there is no hope of overpowering them, for they change
their forms into those of many “varmints” and especially do they affect
the ones that the intruder most fears.
Some of these superstitions were repeated to the Tarkars with the
hope of drawing them out and learning just what they believed. They
accepted them and Olouala offered the solution of the spirits’ faithful
guardianship as it had been explained to him by American negroes. To
make this guardianship effective the promise must be obtained during
the life of the body. “Suppose some one has a treasure he wishes to
conceal--perhaps to bury. He may pick out you who he has never seen
before. Perhaps he asks, ‘Do you want to earn ten dollars?’ Of course
you do, so you go with him. After he gets to the place where he wishes
to bury the gold, he says, ‘I have a treasure here which I wish to
bury. But I have to go away--will you promise to watch it until I come
back?’ You unsuspectingly promise and as you do so you are killed
and your body buried with the treasure that your spirit may guard
it forever.” Instead of a person a faithful and intelligent dog or
horse may be sacrificed. This, however, is not a Tarkar superstition,
but is common to our negro and creole population. The Tarkars during
their long residence have explored every foot of this region in their
searches for game, berries, fruits, and herbs and they have never
had any encounters with the Magazine Point ghosts or any intimation
of their presence. Kazoola, however, naïvely intimated that he would
prefer not to know where they were located, as he might have occasion
to go to these places, and if he did not know where these ghosts were
supposed to be, he would not be annoyed or frightened by seeing them.
The life of the Tarkars in America has not been characterized by the
superstitions ascribed to them; instead their history has been one of
hard work, coöperation, self-sacrifice, and a deep longing for home.
Their progress has been deeply interesting. Almost entirely cut off
from white influence--and that with which they came in contact during
their early years in this country could scarcely inspire them with
confidence, for they are keenly watchful and observed the advantage
which one white took over another--yet protected by our laws, they have
worked out their destiny with much more success and honor to themselves
than the generality of American-born negroes or of the free blacks who
were carried by the American Colonization Society back to Africa, and
whose interests have been guarded and furthered by philanthropists.
When the Tarkars first came to Magazine Point all days were alike to
them; they went about doing on Sundays as on other days. Some American
negroes who had become interested in them and who were really their
friends requested them not to work on Sundays but to gather all their
women and children and go with them. They were thus introduced to a
church. There they were told that the God who lived in the sky had
sent a book to the people of the earth, telling them how they must
live. Simple and believing, they readily accepted what was told. The
Old Testament and the dualistic dogma of a God and a Devil made the
same appeal to them that it had to the American negro--there was the
ready response of the primitive imagination to a primitive story. In
them they found an amplification of the gropings of their own minds
into the spiritual. It soothed their sorrows and gave them hope.
Their faith became a simple one, and that of the few old survivors
is one of resignation, hope, and a perfect trust. Poleete has said:
“We know not why these troubles came upon us, but we are all God’s
children--we not always see the way, but his hands guide us and
shape our ends.” Kazoola, in speaking of the death of his wife and
of all his children, likened God to the doctor who “gives us bad
medicine--it’s hard to swallow, but the doctor gives it to us to do us
good. We don’t understand why.” Though Kazoola has an intense longing
for home, he regards his advent to America as a part of the goodness
of God and enjoys telling how after Foster had bought him at Whydah,
he was stolen by one of Dahomey’s men and hidden under the white
house. While concealed, he heard the surf upon the beach. Urged by
an innate curiosity about the mechanism of things, he stole from his
hiding-place and climbed upon the stockade fence; “I hear the noise
of the sea on shore, an’ I wanta see what maka dat noise, an’ how dat
water worka--how it fell on shore an’ went back again. I saw some of
my people in a little boat and I holler to them. Then Captain Foster
spied me, an’ he say, ‘Oh hee! Oh hee!’ an’ pulla me down. An’ I was
the last to go. Supposy I been lef’ behind--what become of Kazoola? Or
supposy de ship turna over, an’ de sharks eat us. Oh Lor’! God is good!”
Mrs. Foster, who always lived near the Tarkars, said they have always
been gentle, amiable, and honest and much better than the average
American negro; that it was their perseverance and religious zeal which
built the several churches which are now at Magazine Point. There
was only one among them who proved unregenerate--old Zooma who still
lives--but she belonged to another tribe, the Tarkbar, and presents
totally different characteristics; also different color, physical
development, and tribal marks. She has been seen to make a cross and
spit in the middle of it. The others do not seem to understand her
motive.
After the surrender the Tarkars wished to go back to their own country
but had no money. They concluded to save. They worked in the mills for
a dollar a day, but could not save without help, so they said to their
wives, “Now we want to go home and it takes a lot of money. You must
help us save. You see fine clothes--you must not crave them.” The
wives promised and replied: “_You_ see fine clothes and new hats--now
don’t you crave them either. We will work together.” They made six
dollars a week. Of this they could save two dollars, sometimes three,
but they had rent to pay and found they could not get ahead that way,
for it would take a lot of money to get home. Among themselves they
talked over the injustice of their position--how Meaher had brought
them from their native land and how they now had neither home nor
country. Kazoola, who seems to have always been a spokesman, concluded
he would present their case to Meaher. Soon after he was cutting timber
(just back of where the schoolhouse now stands), Captain Tim Meaher
came along and sat upon a felled tree. Kazoola recognized this to be
his opportunity, stopped work, and stood looking at Meaher, all his
emotion speaking through his expressive face. The captain looked up
from the stick he was whittling and struck by the sorrow in the man’s
face asked:
“Kazoola, what makes you so sad?”
“I grieve for my home.”
“But you’ve got a good home.”
“Captain Tim, how big is Mobile?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been to the four corners.”
“If you give Kazoola all Mobile, that railroad, and the banks of Mobile
Kazoola does not want them for this is not home.”
When the old man tells this his face reflects overwhelming grief--in
his eyes there is the far-away vision of home, and in a low voice he
moans, “Oh Lor’! Oh Lor’!” Then he regains himself and goes on with his
narrative.
“Captain Tim, you brought us from our country where we had land and
home. You made us slaves. Now we are free, without country, land, or
home. Why don’t you give us a piece of this land and let us build for
ourselves an African Town?”
Kazoola relates Meaher’s reply very dramatically.
“Thou fool! Thinkest thou I will give you property upon property? You
do not belong to me now!”
The Tarkars concluded to buy. When one reached this conclusion, the
others said: “If you are going to buy, we will too.” They bought
property from Meaher, who made them no concessions. They worked and
saved, going half clad and living upon half rations. Though accustomed
in their own country to Nature’s luxuries, they now lived on molasses
and corn-bread or mush (boiled corn-meal). The men worked in the mills
and their wives helped by planting gardens and fruit trees and becoming
venders of fruit and vegetables. Their Tarkar home began to be a
chimera; day after day new ties pushed it farther away.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Olouala.]
Having no head of the tribe, and understanding that in a country of
different institutions a king would be incongruous, they selected
Charlee (Orsey, in Tarkar), Gumpa (African Peter), and Jaybee as judges
to preside over the colony, to arbitrate their differences, and direct
their lives. When disagreements came up, word would be sent each member
that there would be a meeting at a certain place after dark--their only
leisure time--possibly at the home of one of the judges.[22]
The offenders would be given a hearing before the whole colony--each
side would be weighed and each reprimanded with a warning to “go
and keep the peace.” If they again broke it, or renewed their
disagreements, they were punished--Jaybee, Gumpa, or Charlee
administering a whipping to the culprits. Of these judges, there
lives to-day only Charlee, who has passed the century mark and is[23]
tottering on the brink of the grave. Yet the nine surviving Tarkars,
and each of these has seen his three-score years and ten, look upon
him as the head, observe his admonitions, and never disobey him. His
face is one of the most kindly and he is known among his people as
never having disputed or disagreed with any one. As old as they are, if
Charlee told them they could not do a thing, no matter how strong the
desire, they would not disobey. The judges were not considered above
reproach. If any of the colony saw one of them doing that which was
wrong, he would be rebuked: “We saw you do this thing. It is not right.
How do you expect us to do right if you do not show us the way?”
About ten years after the close of the Civil War, when the South was
still largely under carpetbag régime, interest in elections was intense
and the outcome of vital importance to the community. Opposing parties
used almost any means at their command to obtain votes. Meaher went
among the Tarkars, explaining the methods and significance of voting
and urging them to vote the Democratic ticket. He was followed by some
Republicans who promised them great rewards. They talked this new thing
over among themselves and concluded that by voting the Republican
ticket they would gain much good. On election day, Olouala, Poleete,
and Kazoola walked, one behind the other (a Tarkar custom), to the
polls at Whistler. Meaher was there; he pointed them out, “See those
Africans? Don’t let them vote--they are not of this country.” They
were refused so walked to McGuire’s, but Meaher who had been watching
them and knew their persistency, had ridden ahead and forestalled
them; they were again refused. This only whetted their desire and
their determination, and they walked on down St. Stephen’s Road to the
next voting place. Arriving there, Meaher was just getting off his
horse. “Don’t let those Africans vote--they have no right--they are
not of this country.” Defeated again, the three now wanted to vote so
badly, that they put their hands together, raised them to the sky,
and prayed God that He would permit them to vote. Strengthened, they
walked on to Mobile and at the polls on St. Francis Street told their
experience. They were informed that by paying one dollar they could
vote. This they did and received a paper which they still treasure. It
was their one experience in politics, and it was satisfying for they
accomplished what they had set out to do, though the great promises
never materialized.
Of the one hundred and sixteen Africans who were brought to this
country in the _Clotilde_, there are only eight living: five women,
Abaché (Clara Turner), Monabee (Kitty Cooper), Shamber, Kanko (who
married Jim Dennison), and Zooma; and three men, Poleete, Kazoola
(Cudjoe Lewis), and Olouala (Orsey Kan). Their Tarkar names have been
used in this narrative at their request. They love them and with some
pathos asked that they be used, because in some way these names might
drift back to their native home, where some might remember them.
This small fragment gathers on Sundays after church at the home of
Poleete, Kazoola, or Abaché and discuss among themselves the things
pertaining to their welfare, and they never part without speaking of
their African home and telling some incident of that beloved place.
Kazoola says he often thinks that if he had wings he would fly back;
then he remembers that all he has lies in American soil--the wife who
came from his native land, who was his helpmate and companion through
the many years, and all his children. It was at some of these Sunday
afternoon gatherings that he made the parables about his wife, Albiné
(Celie), which are a solace to him in his sorrow and loneliness. The
Sunday after her death, the Tarkars were sitting with Kazoola in his
home. He sat with head bowed down, grief-stricken, and speaking no
word. They said, “Lift up your head, Kazoola, and speak with us.”
Kazoola lifted his head; “I will make a parable. Kazoola and Albiné
have gone to Mobile together. They get on the train to go home and sit
side by side. The conductor comes along and says to Kazoola, ‘Where
are you going to get off?’ and Kazoola replies, ‘Mount Vernon.’ The
conductor then asks Albiné, ‘Where are you going to get off?’ and she
replies ‘Plateau.’[24] Kazoola surprised, turns to Albiné and asks,
‘Why, Albiné! How is this? Why do you say you are going to get off at
Plateau?’ She answers, ‘I must get off.’ The train stops and Albiné
gets off. Kazoola stays on--he is alone. But old Kazoola has not
reached Mount Vernon yet--he is still journeying on.”
On the next Sunday they were again gathered at Kazoola’s house; again
he sat with bowed head, and again they asked him to lift up his head
and make another parable.
“Suppose Charlee comes to my house and wants to go on to Poleete’s. He
has an umbrella which he leaves in my care. When he comes back he asks
for his umbrella--must I give it to him or must I keep it?”
The listening Tarkars cried out, “No, Kazoola! You cannot keep it--it
is not yours!”
And Kazoola answered, “Neither could I keep Albiné; she was just left
in my care.”[25]
Kazoola never married again; he sees Albiné everywhere about the
house. Everything reminds him of her. One day he was working in his
corn-patch, weeding out superfluous stalks. He came to two growing
together--the root of one intertwined with the other. He started to
pull one out, but something within told him to stop, that thus had he
and Albiné grown together and one stalk could not be pulled up without
hurting the other. So he saved the two, giving them especial care, and
he was rewarded by each bearing four ears of corn. These he was going
to save for seed and grieves that a cow should have gotten in and
destroyed them. The old man is cheerful--even merry--possessing a keen
sense of humor and a lively imagination. To appreciate him fully he
must be surprised at his home. There he will be found probably working
in his garden barefooted, trousers rolled up above his knees; his
costume clean but a marvelous piece of patchwork, even the old derby
upon his head a much mended one. His patches need elicit no sympathy,
for patching is an accomplishment in which he takes keen delight; even
in the old days when his Albiné was alive, she would wash his clothes
and lay them aside for him to patch during the evenings when the day’s
work was done.
The Tarkars range in color from light to a very dark brown. All bear
upon their faces the Tarkar tribal marks--two lines between the eyes
and three on the cheek. While quite distinct, these marks are not
disfiguring. Their teeth bear the marks of family and of kinship and
vary in each. The process of marking the teeth was by pecking with a
stone implement. The lower corners of Poleete’s two front teeth where
they meet are pecked off, forming a wedge-shaped opening like an
inverted V. When Kazoola’s teeth are closed, on one side there is a
circular opening which was formed by cutting off parts of a half-dozen
teeth. Six of Abaché’s upper front teeth are trimmed to make a convex
opening. The Tarkars differ in feature from the American negro; it
is a subtle difference but runs through the whole face. Their heads
differ structurally--the line from the forehead to the chin is nearer
straight. They have more top head and there is a fullness indicating
plenty of intelligence--a possession they have exhibited in their neat
homes and thrifty lives. Some of them have even learned to read; this
was taught them by their children who have profited by the public
schools. Poleete’s constant companion is a small, much worn New
Testament. Their countenances naturally vary with their temperaments.
Abaché’s and Kazoola’s are as open as a book--intensely emotional and
capable of expressing very deep feeling. None have gotten over the
shock of their early experience. When these are referred to there
comes into Kazoola’s and Abaché’s faces unspeakable and indescribable
anguish. Poleete’s is like a mask, unchanging, unscrutable, except for
the eyes, and these--small, deep-set, watchful--are almost uncanny.
Among themselves they speak the Tarkar language. Their English is very
broken and is not always intelligible even to those who have lived
among them for many years. It has more the sound of the dialect spoken
by Italians than that spoken by the negroes. They make almost constant
use of the “a” sound as a terminal--looka, pulla, worka, etc. Their
sentences are short and vivid. The few words of old Gumpa, “My people
sold me and your people bought me,” accompanied by his expression, told
his whole history.
They are extremely clean both about their persons and their homes,
and one of their strongest objections to the average American negro
is uncleanliness. Abaché parts her hair in the middle and combs it
neatly back. She uses face powder, because it is refreshing and leaves
a cleanly feeling. The other women are very old and feeble, except
Kanko who, though old, works as a man. Her especial occupation is the
breeding and raising of a fine strain of hogs. The Tarkars are very
considerate of each other, and their intercourse is marked by kindness,
charity, and harmony.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Charlee, Head of the Tarkars.]
In strong contrast to the Tarkars is old Zooma, who is possibly the
last Tarkbar. Rendered almost helpless by a century and more of
years and many pounds of superfluous flesh, she sits for the most part
silent and brooding in her squalid hut. If near the door or window
there are no softening shadows, and the light reveals all her fat,
brutal old ugliness--an ugliness, accentuated by disfiguring tribal
marks--three deep gashes meeting at the bridge of the nose, and running
diagonally across each cheek. Her underlip hangs away as if it had
been subjected in her native land to some kind of African beautifying
process. Her hair is white and the skin of her hands and feet wrinkled,
resembling in texture that of an elephant, and bearing the curious
gray color seen in the complexions of very old negroes. It is almost
impossible to understand her broken phrases, but a daughter acts as
interpreter. Brooding, she is pathetic; aroused and speaking of home
she is tragic. She has in common with the Tarkars the same pitiful
history and the same despair, without their resignation. For each and
all, Heaven could hold no promise so rapturous as just one last vision
of home. Such a vision that comes as they sit together, which bows
their old heads, lays silent fingers upon their lips, and speaks to
their aching hearts of perpetual summer, fertile lands, abundance of
fruit--of youth, plenty, and peace--their Land of Long Ago.
CHAPTER X
IMPRESSIONS OF ALABAMA IN 1846[26]
The trip of Lafayette through this country in the twenties was more or
less spectacular, and the places he visited are to-day pointed out as
historic, yet only twenty years later Lyell, whose name will go down
the ages linked with Goethe, Lamarck, and Darwin, covered much the
same ground, and it is only in scientific works that one is reminded
of the fact. In recent reading, after meeting with several references
to his stay in Alabama, I became interested, and it was with intense
delight that I was carried back and saw our own section through the
eyes of that wonderful observer and thinker. All awe of Charles Lyell,
scientist and arch-destroyer of the anthropocentric idea which for so
many centuries fettered the world of thought, was at once dispelled,
for there was that in his charming geniality that makes the “whole
world kin”--even a Charles Lyell and the pine-woods squatter, whose
hospitality he often accepted when on geologic excursions.
Lyell made two trips to the United States--the first in 1841-42, which
furnished material for his _Travels in North America_. He came as far
south as Savannah. His _Travels in the United States_ is the record of
his second visit, when Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana
formed a part of his itinerary. Aside from the geologic importance of
these two works, there could scarcely be a more faithful portrayal
of American manners, customs, and peculiarities. They were largely
instrumental in ameliorating British animosity by giving the English a
better and kindlier understanding of Americans. At the time of their
publication, they naturally found in this country a circulation only
among the few, and are now rare books. His observations on the social
conditions that made the South unique and that have been obliterated
during the lapse of a half century are deeply interesting to the
student of to-day.
[Illustration: Kazoola.]
On January 15, 1846, we find Lyell and his wife entering Macon,
Georgia, by train. His eye was immediately attracted by “a wooden
edifice of very peculiar structure and picturesque form, crowning one
of the hills.” Learning that it was a blockhouse that had been in real
service as a fort against Indians only twenty-five years before, when
this frontier knew not the white man’s habitat, it was with a mixed
feeling of amusement and incongruity that he received the information
that a conspicuous building nearby was a “female seminary, lately
established by the Methodists, where all young ladies take degrees.”
From Macon to Columbus, Georgia, he had his first experience in a
Southern stage-coach which, while novel, must have proved far from
comfortable, for he did not forget to record the jolts caused by
miserable roads and reckless driving. Leaving Columbus he was soon
in the undulating pine-lands of Alabama, the monotony of which was
frequently broken by swamps of palmetto and magnolia. The spirit of
the pines must have sung to him, too, for the “sound of the wind in
the boughs of the long-leaved pine” always reminded him of the “waves
breaking on a distant shore, and it was agreeable to hear it swelling
gradually, then dying away as the breeze rose and fell.” Near Chehaw,
the stage stopped at a log cabin in the woods for the passengers to
dine. It did not look promising, and Lyell was ready to “put up with
bad fare,” but on entering found on the table “a wild turkey roasted,
venison steaks, and a partridge-pie, all the product of the neighboring
forest.” Noticing the stumps of many pines, he counted the rings of
annual growth to ascertain how long it would take to replace such a
forest. The oldest tree that he examined measured four feet in diameter
at three feet above the base, and showed three hundred and twenty
rings. He also found the ravines that are common throughout Southern
Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to be of recent formation and caused
by deforestation, showing the tertiary regions and also part of the
cretaceous strata which have “always been as destructible as now” to
have been from the beginning covered with dense forests. Where the
trees have been cut, the sun’s heat on the clay often causes cracks,
and when the rains come in semi-tropical torrents these deepen until
such ravines as are familiar to Mobilians about Spring Hill are the
result--only they are of more rapid growth.
At Chehaw they took train for Montgomery. Even at that early time,
and in a region “where the schoolmaster has not been much abroad,” we
meet the prototype of the newsboy of to-day; Lyell’s picture of him
unconcernedly jumping on and off moving trains is the “butcher-boy” we
all know. One boy was calling out in the midst of a pine-barren, “a
novel by Paul de Kock--the Bulwer of France--all the go!--more popular
than the Wandering Jew.” Lyell, having bought newspapers promiscuously
throughout the many States he visited, found our press to be in every
way on an equal with that of Great Britain. A large portion of the
papers was “devoted to literary extracts, to novels, travels, tales,
and often more serious subjects.”
Reaching Montgomery, he remained there a few days examining the
geologic formations and remains of that region. It was his intention
to go directly to Tuscaloosa, only one hundred miles distant by land,
but every one advised him that he would at that season save both time
and money by taking an eight hundred mile trip down the Alabama River
by boat to Mobile, and up again on the Tombigbee. The _Amaranth_ was
scheduled to leave at ten o’clock, January 28, 1846. Accustomed to
Northern punctuality, they went down on time, and learned with some
annoyance that she might not sail until the next day. It was his first
sight of our “magnificent Southern river boats.” He and Mrs. Lyell made
up their minds to look on it as “their inn and read and write there”
and were soon enjoying “its luxuries which Southern manners and a hot
climate require.” He describes very fully the peculiar construction
which adapts the boats to rivers which rise and fall rapidly. When
recording that some of them could float in two feet of water, he adds,
“but they cannot quite realize the boast of a western captain, that he
could sail wherever it was damp.”
It would be too much to write in detail of all the things which
interested Lyell, for nothing seems to have escaped him. At each
landing, however, he collected many cretaceous fossils, so concluded
to stop a few days at Claiborne, whose bluff had long been known to
geologists as “classic ground,” having already yielded four hundred
species of tertiary shells, belonging to the Eocene formation. He
notes, too, the finding of a fossil zeuglodon in the same cliff by
Mr. Hale of Mobile. “The morning after our arrival, January 29th, the
thermometer stood at eighty degrees F. in the shade, and the air was
as balmy as an English summer day. Before the house stood a row of
Pride-of-India trees ladened with bunches of yellow berries. I had
often been told by the negroes that the American robin ‘got drunk’ on
this fruit, and we now had an opportunity of witnessing its narcotic
properties; for we saw some children playing with one of these birds
before the house, having caught it after it had eaten freely of these
berries. My wife, seeing that the robin was in no small danger of
perishing, bought it of the children for some sugar-plums, and it
soon revived in our room, and flew out of the window. In the evening
we enjoyed a sight of one of those glorious sunsets, the beauty of
which in these latitudes is so striking, when the clouds and sky are
lighted up with streaks of brilliant yellow, red, and green, which, if
a painter should represent faithfully, might seem as exaggerated and
gaudy as the colors of an American forest in autumn when compared with
European woods.”
He crossed the river to visit the Blounts at Woodlawn. Leaving his wife
with Mrs. Blount, he went with Mr. Blount by carriage to Clarksville,
where the enormous fossil zeuglodons had been found. “The district we
passed through was situated in the fork of the Alabama and Tombeckbee
rivers, where the aboriginal forest was only broken here and there by a
few clearings. At Macon my attention was forcibly called to the newness
of things by my friend’s pointing out to me the ground where there had
been a bloody fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and how the clerk
of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had won the
battle.” The Indian paths, still tractable through the forests near
Tuscaloosa, awakened the same feeling. On his return he and his wife
crossed to Claiborne to await the Mobile steamer, and he expresses his
pleasure at finding it, the _Amaranth_, commanded by his “old friend
Captain Bragdon.”
Reaching Mobile, the Tuscaloosa steamer was ready to start, so they
were soon northward bound on the Tombeckbee, then so high “that the
trees of both banks seemed to be growing in a lake.” Arriving at
Tuscaloosa where there was a “flourishing college” he was met by Mr.
Brumley, the professor of chemistry who at once conducted him to the
outlying coal-fields. He found the coal, even of the strata exposed to
the surface to be “excellent quality and highly bituminous.” Here there
is a bit of justification in Huxley’s criticism of Lyell’s aversion
“to look beyond the veil of stratified rocks,” for while he notes
with seeming satisfaction the imprints of the fossil plants in the
black shale to be exactly the same as those existing in the “ancient
coal-measures of Europe and America,” there is no foreshadowing of
the explanation given by recent geology and astronomy, that even as
late as the early carboniferous era, there were no seasons, the earth
being wrapped in a uniform, vaporous warmth greater than the heat now
existing in the tropics; a heat which came not from the sun, but the
earth itself. One proof lies in the fact that irrespective of latitude,
the same organic remains are found--their nearest of kin of to-day
living only in the tropics; also that there are no rings of annual
growth in carboniferous tree-life.
Lyell and Professor Brumley extending their wanderings, “entered about
thirty-three miles northeast of Tuscaloosa a region called Rooke’s
Valley, where rich beds of iron-stone and lime-stone bid fair, by
their proximity to the coal, to become one day a source of great
mineral wealth.” He was not only indebted to Professor Brumley for
much scientific information, but also to Mr. Bernard, the teacher of
astronomy, who showed him some “double stars and constellations not
visible in England,”--the telescope a recent acquisition from London.
Mrs. Lyell also made many friends in Tuscaloosa, among them two ladies
who were reading as a “pastime Goethe and Schiller in the original.”
From Tuscaloosa to Mobile Lyell had splendid chances of studying the
geological character of the country, and he frequently expresses
appreciation of the courtesy and assistance always given him throughout
Alabama, contrasting it with the “ignorant wonder” the fossil hunter
inspires in unfrequented districts of England, France, and Italy.
He was anxious to examine the calcareous bluff at St. Stephen’s. Night
fell before they reached it, but Captain Lavargy stopped, said he could
take on wood, gave him a boat and two negroes bearing pine torches,
thus making it possible for him to thoroughly explore the whole cliff
and find many fossils.
[Illustration: Zooma, the Last Tarkbar.]
Mobile again claims him on February 21, 1846, and flaunts her spring
forwardness by touches of green on the cypress and cotton trees, and
scarlet seed-vessels on the rubra. “In the gardens there were jonquils
and snow-drops in flower, and for the first time, we saw that beautiful
evergreen, the yellow-jessamine, in full bloom, trailed along the wall
of Dr. Hamilton’s house.” Anxious for his first sight of the Gulf of
Mexico, he drove with Dr. Hamilton, the Presbyterian minister, to the
light-house (situated on Choctaw Point and washed away by the storm
of 1852), and, from the tower had a “splendid view of the city to
the North, and to the South the noble bay of Mobile, fourteen miles
across.” He then went to the bay which lay “smooth and unruffled,
the woods coming down everywhere to its edge.” He noted the immense
amount of driftwood, dug up bivalve-shelled gnathodons that live in our
mud-banks, and that will in future ages indicate the position of our
rivers. He found Mobile to be built upon a deposit of these shells,
the stratification of which proved that it had been thrown up by the
waves. Our delta, in the soft mud of which cattle are frequently mired
and which receives carcasses washed down by the rivers and thrown up
by the sea, exemplifies the formation of such regions as the Fayûm of
Egypt--the elephant’s ancestral home--now covered by desert sands, but
which is each day yielding priceless treasure to the paleontologist.
On February 23d, the _James L. Day_, bound for New Orleans, “sailed out
of the beautiful bay of Mobile in the evening,” carrying aboard Charles
Lyell and his wife.
At the time of Lyell’s visit, Alabama lay struggling in the grasp of
that spirit of unrest which from the most remote antiquity as often
obsessed people of the Aryan race, calling them ever westwards towards
the setting sun. Everywhere he met “movers”--Texas masking as the
Promised Land, beckoning to the cultured as to the ignorant. Adventure
prompted many, others knew not why they were going, some were “eaten
out by their negroes,” and one informant said: “If we remain here, we
are reduced to the alternative of high taxes to pay the interest of
money so improvidently borrowed from England, or to suffer the disgrace
of repudiation, which would be doubly shameful, because the money was
received in hard cash, and lent out, often rashly by the State to
farmers for agricultural improvements. Besides, all the expenses of the
Government were in reality defrayed during several years by borrowed
money and the burthen of the debt thrown on posterity. The facility
with which your English capitalists, in 1821, lent their cash to a
State from which the Indians were not yet expelled without reflecting
on the migratory nature of the white population is astonishing. The
planters, who got the grants of your money and spent it, have nearly
all of them moved off and settled beyond the Mississippi.” But Lyell
had faith in Alabama’s natural resources, which he felt were so great
that only a moderate amount of economy would be necessary to surmount
all embarrassments.
Texas and the probability of war with England over the Oregon Question
were topics discussed on every hand. Lyell would hear the English
adversely criticized and such boasts as “we have whipped them twice,
and should whip them a third time,” but where his nationality was
known, he says, “never once were any speeches, uncourteous in their
tone towards my country, uttered in my hearing.”
On his geologizing trips, which would have oftentimes been hard on
any one not riding his own hobby, he was forced to stop where night
overtook him, so that even the habits of the “crackers” became familiar
to him. “In many houses I hesitated to ask for water or towels, for
fear of giving offense ... nor could I venture to ask any one to rub a
thick coat of mud off my trousers, lest I should be thought to reflect
on members of the family, who had no idea of indulging in such luxuries
themselves. I felt the want of a private bed-room, but very soon came
to regard it as a privilege to be allowed even a bed to myself.”
In his wanderings, he also met “clay-eaters”[27]--a people curious
in their cravings for certain kinds of clay. Their peculiar green
complexion indicating anemia, which usually terminates in dropsy, was
formerly considered a sequence to the gratification of this abnormal
appetite, but is now supposed to be a result of a pathogenic parasite
found in the small intestine.[28] The type is still a most familiar one
in the hill-country just west of Mobile.
When dubious about safety from highwaymen, Lyell was assured that in
the South this class was unknown; the working class being the slave
class there was no poor made desperate by want. And that the Texas wars
had relieved the different communities of their dare-devil spirits.
Lyell was often amused and astonished at the Southerner’s loyal support
of an ultra-Democratic notion of white equality, which in practice must
have been thoroughly uncongenial to all classes concerned. He visited
a lawyer at his country home--the family a cultivated one, used to the
best society of a large city--but the host regarded it as an obligation
to invite Lyell’s driver, who was half Indian, to sit down to the table
with them. Perhaps a consciousness that this boasted equality was
more or less fictitious may have been responsible for the vindictive
envy which flourished in the midst of this “aristocratic democracy.”
A jealousy so intense that a gentleman growing rich and settling in
a quiet part of the country was apt to have his fences pulled down,
cattle turned out to roam, and other indignities perpetrated. Many
anecdotes of the genuineness and prevalence of this feeling were told
to Lyell. The daughter of a member of the Legislature visited Mobile,
had a dress made with flounces according to the latest fashion, and
on her return home wore it to a ball. At the next election her father
was defeated, and on asking a former supporter the cause received the
reply, “Do you think they would vote for you, after your daughter came
to the ball in them fixings?”
Lyell found drunkenness very common, yet heard many speak of the great
temperance reform, it being no longer considered an insult to refuse
to drink with one’s host. While he saw no cruelty to slaves, he felt
that when drunkenness was so general among the owners their power might
often be an abusive one. He states that it was not the object of his
visit to study slavery, but his interesting observations would fill a
chapter and are characterized by a keenness and fairness which make
them very valuable. The stories told him by disgruntled and misinformed
Northerners had prepared him for blood-curdling atrocities, but
throughout Alabama he saw the negro in many phases: in his churches,
about his pleasures, and at his occupations that ranged from farmhand
to mechanic; in the slave-market, as the indulged domestic, and as
the faithful and cheerful follower of his master into new and unknown
regions; and on no occasion had he reason to suspect maltreatment.
When speaking to a Northern man of his favorable impressions, he was
told that “great pains had been taken by the planters to conceal the
true state of things”--that he had been “propitiated by hospitable
attentions.” Lyell found his own experience corroborated in a
_Tradesman’s Journal_, written by William Thompson, a Scotch weaver,
who supported himself by his trade as he journeyed through the South.
After seeing what contact with the whites had done for the negro, Lyell
entertained very sanguine hopes of the race’s intellectual and moral
possibilities, and was impatient of what seemed to him unjust laws
which restricted the black educationally and politically. His two-sided
attitude is a bit disarming, but is explained by himself. “We are often
thrown into opposite states of mind and feeling, according as the
interest of the white or negro happens, for the moment, to claim our
sympathy.” But the following words embody an unbiased and a beautiful
tribute to the influence of the Southerners: “In spite of prejudice
and fear, and in defiance of stringent laws enacted against education,
three million of a more enlightened and progressive race are brought
into contact with an equal number of laborers lately in a savage state,
and taken from a continent where the natives have proved themselves,
for many thousand years, to be singularly unprogressive. Already their
taskmasters have taught them to speak, with more or less accuracy,
one of the noblest of languages, to shake off many old superstitions,
to acquire higher ideals of morality, and habits of neatness and
cleanliness, and have converted thousands of them to Christianity. Many
they have emancipated, and the rest are gradually approaching to the
condition of the ancient serfs of Europe half a century or more before
their bondage died out.
“All this has been done at an enormous sacrifice of time and money;
an expense, indeed, which all the Governments of Europe and all the
Christian missionaries, whether Romanist or Protestant, could never
have effected in five centuries. Even in the few States which I have
already visited since I crossed the Potomac, several hundred thousand
whites of all ages, among whom the children are playing by no means
the least effective part, are devoting themselves with greater or less
activity to these involuntary educational exertions.”
THE END
[1] _Reprinted from “South Atlantic Quarterly,” July, 1908._
[2] Smith’s _Historie of Virginia_.
[3] “Their features are recorded by their ancient enemies, never by
themselves, Egyptian kings, who from earliest times of antiquity,
came often into collision with the blacks, and had them figured as
defeated enemies, as prisoners of war, and as subject nations bringing
tribute. Their grotesque features, so much differing from the Egyptian
type, made them a favorite subject for sculptural supports of thrones,
chairs, vases, etc.; or painted under the soles of sandals, of which
instances abound in museums as well as in the larger works on Egypt....
The other artistical nations of antiquity knew little of the negro
race. They did not come before Solomon’s epoch into immediate and
constant contact with it. We see soon after, however, a negro in an
Assyrian battle scene of the time of Sargon, at Korsabad. He might
have been exported from Memphis by Phœnician slave-dealers to Asia,
where he fell fighting for his master against the Assyrians.... On the
remarkable relief of the tomb of Darius Hystaspes, at Persepolis, we
have the negro as a representative of Africa. The Greeks seldom drew
the blacks; still, on beautiful vases of the British Museum, we meet
with the well known negro features in a battle scene. Another such vase
with the representation of Hercules slaying negroes has been published
by Mecali. Etruscan potters, who liked to draw Oriental types, molded
vases in the shape of a negro head and coupled it sometimes with the
head of white males or females. The British Museum contains several of
these very characteristic utensils.... We possess effigies of negroes
drawn by six different nations of antiquity: Egyptians, Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, from about the eighteenth
century B.C. to the first centuries of our era, which all speak for the
unalterable constancy of the negro type such as in our day.”--Nott and
Gliddon’s _Indigenous Races of the Earth_.
[4] Lecky, _Rationalism in Europe_.
[5] Ranke, _History of the Popes_.
[6] Dean Farrar.
[7] Heylyn’s _Cosmographie_, 1657.
[8] “You may observe, by my proclamation, that I offer freedom to
the blacks of all rebels that join me, in consequence of which there
are between two and three hundred already come in, and those I form
into corps as fast as they come in, giving them white officers and
non-commissions in proportion.”--Letter from Lord Dunmore to General
Howe, dated Williamsburg, Va., Nov. 30, 1775.
[9] _Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson._
[10] Jefferson’s observations to Meunier.
[11] Hamilton’s _Colonial Mobile_.
[12] United States Statutes at Large.
[13] “The Reverend Mr. Coffin of New England who is now here soliciting
donations for a college in Green County, in Tennessee, tells me that
when he first determined to engage in this enterprise, he wrote a
paper recommendatory of the enterprise, which he meant to get signed
by clergymen, and a similar one for persons in a civil character,
at the head of which he wished Mr. Adams to put his name, he being
then President, and the application going only for his name and not a
donation. Mr. Adams, after reading the paper and considering, said,
He saw no possibility of continuing the union of the States; that
their dissolution must necessarily take place; that he therefore saw
no propriety in recommending to New England men to promote a literary
institution in the South; that it was in fact giving strength to those
who were to be their enemies; and therefore he would have nothing to do
with it.”--Thomas Jefferson, _The Anas_, Dec. 13, 1803.
[14] United States Statutes at Large.
[15] _North American Review_, February, 1824.
[16] Right of Search, Daniel Webster.
[17] _Journal de Commercio_, Rio, May 26, 1856.
[18] _Mobile Register_, December, 1858.
[19] Heylyn’s _Cosmographie_, 1657.
[20] _Narrative of Kazoola._
[21] The _R. B. Tainey_ was owned by the Meahers, and is described in
advertisements of that time as a “new, elegant, and light-weight summer
packet; Captain Jim Meaher. Side-wheeler, drawing eight inches of water
with elegant and spacious staterooms and large well-ventilated cabins,
carrying one hundred and fifty passengers.” She had been named for
Chief Justice Tainey who had handed down the famous Dred Scott decision.
[22] These meetings probably account for the reports which have been
recurrent that the Tarkars met secretly and practiced barbaric rites.
[23] Charlee too has recently passed away, 1914.
[24] Mount Vernon is some miles beyond Plateau.
[25] When Albiné first came to America she was very fat and refused
to eat except just enough to keep her alive. When she grew to have
confidence in the whites, she confided to Mrs. Foster, “Albiné not eat
when she first come to America, because Albiné know she fat an’ did not
want white people to eat her.”
[26] Reprinted from _South Atlantic Quarterly_, July, 1908.
[27] There is very little literature about this class which is found in
many parts of the world, and even that consists mostly of references to
them by travelers and ethnologists. The fullest account with which I
am familiar is an article by my uncle, the late Frank L. James, Ph.D.,
M.D., “The Geophagi, or Dirt Eaters,” which appeared in the _National
Druggist_, of March, 1900. Microscopic examinations made by him of the
“dirt” used by our Alabama, Georgia, and Carolina geophagians showed
it to be a ferruginous argilla about ten per cent. diatomaceous. The
“dirt eaters” of the various countries do not eat any kind of clay, but
uniformly affect an argillaceous substance, containing more or less
infusorial matter.
[28] Since the first publication of this article, hookworm
investigations and treatment have become common in all infected
districts of the South.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Illustrations Index: “Eko, Budigree, Abaché, Whydah”
changed to “Eko, Budigree, Adaché, Whydah”
Illustrations Index: Description of “Zooma, The Last Tarkbar”
moved to “Map Drawn by Kazoola”
Page 16: “with that bruitishness which” changed to
“with that brutishness which”
Page 35: “Whereever there was a priest” changed to
“Wherever there was a priest”
Page 69: “drop from us at the table” changed to
“drop from us at the table.”
Page 75: “prowess to the Turkish Janizaries” changed to
“prowess to the Turkish Janizaries.”
Page 123: “root of one interwined with” changed to
“root of one intertwined with”
Page 124: “Six of Abache’s upper front” changed to
“Six of Abaché’s upper front”
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