The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861

There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. Upon this point my inquiries were particular, and always with the same result. When we said to them, "You don't want to be free,—your masters say you don't,"—they manifested much indignation, answering, "We do want to be free,—we want to be for ourselves." We inquired further, "Do the house slaves who wear their master's clothes want to be free?" "We never heard of one who did not," was the instant reply. There might be, they said, some half-crazy one who did not care to be free, but they had never seen one. Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling. An intelligent Secessionist, Lowry by name, who was examined at head-quarters, admitted that a majority of the slaves wanted to be free. The more intelligent the slave and the better he had been used, the stronger this desire seemed to be. I remember one such particularly, the most intelligent one in Hampton, known as "an, influential darky" ("darky" being the familiar term applied by the contrabands to themselves). He could read, was an exhorter in the Church, and officiated in the absence of the minister. He would have made a competent juryman. His mistress, he said, had been kind to him, and had never spoken so harshly to him as a captain's orderly in the Naval Brigade had done, who assumed one day to give him orders. She had let him work where he pleased, and he was to bring her a fixed sum, and appropriate the surplus to his own use. She pleaded with him to go away with her from Hampton at the time of the exodus, but she would not force him to leave his family. Still he hated to be a slave, and he talked like a philosopher about his rights. No captive in the galleys of Algiers, not Lafayette in an Austrian dungeon, ever pined more for free air. He had saved eighteen hundred dollars of his surplus earnings in attending on visitors at Old Point, and had spent it all in litigation to secure the freedom of his wife and children, belonging to another master, whose will had emancipated them, but was contested on the ground of the insanity of the testator. He had won a verdict, but his lawyers told him they could not obtain a judgment upon it, as the judge was unfavorable to freedom.

The most frequent question asked of one who has had any means of communication with the contrabands during the war is in relation to their knowledge of its cause and purposes, and their interest in it. One thing was evident,—indeed, you could not talk with a slave who did not without prompting give the same testimony,—that their masters had been most industrious in their attempts to persuade them that the Yankees were coming down there only to get the land,—that they would kill the negroes and manure the ground with them, or carry them off to Cuba or Hayti and sell them. An intelligent man who had belonged to Colonel Joseph Segar—almost the only Union man at heart in that region, and who for that reason, being in Washington at the time the war began, had not dared to return to Hampton—served the staff of General Pierce. He bore the highest testimony to the kindness of his master, who, he said, told him to remain,—that the Yankees were the friends of his people, and would use them well. "But," said David,—for that was his name,—"I never heard of any other master who talked that way, but they all told the worst stories about the Yankees, and the mistresses were more furious even than the masters." David, I may add, spite of his good master, longed to be free.

The masters, in their desperation, had within a few months resorted to another device to secure the loyalty of their slaves. The colored Baptist minister had been something of a pet among the whites, and had obtained subscriptions from some benevolent citizens to secure the freedom of a handsome daughter of his who was exposed to sale on an auction block, where her beauty inspired competition. Some leading Secessionists, Lawyer Hope for one, working somewhat upon his gratitude and somewhat upon his vanity, persuaded him to offer the services of himself and his sons, in a published communication, to the cause of Virginia and the Confederate States. The artifice did not succeed. He lost his hold on his congregation, and could not have safely remained after the whites left. He felt uneasy about his betrayal, and tried to restore himself to favor by saying that he meant no harm to his people; but his protestations were in vain. His was the deserved fate of those in all ages who, victims of folly or bribes, turn their backs on their fellows.

Notwithstanding all these attempts, the negroes, with rare exceptions, still believed that the Yankees were their friends. They had learned something in Presidential elections, and they thought their masters could not hate us as they did, unless we were their friends. They believed that the troubles would somehow or other help them, although they did not understand all that was going on. They may be pardoned for their want of apprehension, when some of our public men, almost venerable, and reputed to be very wise and philosophical, are bewildered and grope blindly. They were somewhat perplexed by the contradictory statements of our soldiers, some of whom, according to their wishes, said the contest was for them, and others that it did not concern them at all and they would remain as before. If it was explained to them, that Lincoln was chosen by a party who were opposed to extending slavery, but who were also opposed to interfering with it in Virginia,—that Virginia and the South had rebelled, and we had come to suppress the rebellion,—and although the object of the war was not to emancipate them, yet that might be its result,—they answered, that they understood the statement perfectly. They did not seem inclined to fight, although willing to work. More could not be expected of them while nothing is promised to them. What latent inspirations they may have remains to be seen. They had at first a mysterious dread of fire-arms, but familiarity is rapidly removing that.

The religious element of their life has been noticed. They said they had prayed for this day, and God had sent Lincoln in answer to their prayers. We used to overhear their family devotions, somewhat loud according to their manner, in which they prayed earnestly for our troops. They built their hopes of freedom on Scriptural examples, regarding the deliverance of Daniel from the lions' den, and of the Three Children from the furnace, as symbolic of their coming freedom. One said to me, that masters, before they died, by their wills sometimes freed their slaves, and he thought that a type that they should become free.

One Saturday evening one of them asked me to call and see him at his home the next morning. I did so, and he handed me a Bible belonging to his mistress, who had died a few days before, and whose bier I had helped to carry to the family vault. He wanted me to read to him the eleventh chapter of Daniel. It seemed, that, as one of the means of keeping them quiet, the white clergymen during the winter and spring had read them some verses from it to show that the South would prevail, enforcing passages which ascribed great dominion to "the king of the South," and suppressing those which subsequently give the supremacy to "the king of the North." A colored man who could read had found the latter passages and made them known. The chapter is dark with mystery, and my auditor, quite perplexed as I read on, remarked, "The Bible is a very mysterious book." I read to him also the thirty-fourth chapter of Jeremiah, wherein the sad prophet of Israel records the denunciations by Jehovah of sword, pestilence, and famine against the Jews for not proclaiming liberty to their servants and handmaids. He had not known before that there were such passages in the Bible.

The conversations of the contrabands on their title to be regarded as freemen showed reflection. When asked if they thought themselves fit for freedom, and if the darkies were not lazy, their answer was, "Who but the darkies cleared all the land round here? Yes, there are lazy darkies, but there are more lazy whites." When told that the free blacks had not succeeded, they answered that the free blacks have not had a fair chance under the laws,—that they don't dare to enforce their claims against white men,—that a free colored blacksmith had a thousand dollars due to him from white men, but he was afraid to sue for any portion of it. One man, when asked why he ought to be free, replied,—"I feed and clothe myself and pay my master one hundred and twenty dollars a year; and the one hundred and twenty dollars is just so much taken from me, which ought to be used to make me and my children comfortable." Indeed, broken as was their speech and limited as was their knowledge, they reasoned abstractly on their rights as well as white men. Locke or Channing might have fortified the argument for universal liberty from their simple talk. So true is it that the best thoughts which the human intellect has produced have come, not from affluent learning or ornate speech, but from the original elements of our nature, common to all races of men and all conditions in life; and genius the highest and most cultured may bend with profit to catch the lowliest of human utterances.

There was a very general desire among the contrabands to know how to read. A few had learned; and these, in every instance where we inquired as to their teacher, had been taught on the sly in their childhood by their white playmates. Others knew their letters, but could not "put them together," as they said. I remember of a summer's afternoon seeing a young married woman, perhaps twenty-five years old, seated on a door-step with her primer before her, trying to make progress.

In natural tact and the faculty of getting a livelihood the contrabands are inferior to the Yankees, but quite equal to the mass of the Southern population. It is not easy to see why they would be less industrious, if free, than the whites, particularly as they would have the encouragement of wages. There would be transient difficulties at the outset, but no more than a bad system lasting for ages might be expected to leave behind. The first generation might be unfitted for the active duties and responsibilities of citizenship; but this difficulty, under generous provisions for education, would not pass to the next. Even now they are not so much behind the masses of the whites. Of the Virginians who took the oath of allegiance at Hampton, not more than one in fifteen could write his name, and the rolls captured at Hatteras disclose an equally deplorable ignorance. The contrabands might be less addicted than the now dominant race to bowie-knives and duels, think less of the value of bludgeons as forensic arguments, be less inhospitable to innocent sojourners from Free States, and have far inferior skill in robbing forts and arsenals, plundering the Treasury, and betraying the country at whose crib they had fattened; but mankind would forgive them for not acquiring these accomplishments of modern treason. As a race, they may be less vigorous and thrifty than the Saxon, but they are more social, docile, and affectionate, fulfilling the theory which Channing held in relation to them, if advanced to freedom and civilization.

If in the progress of the war they should be called to bear arms, there need be no reasonable apprehension that they would exhibit the ferocity of savage races. Unlike such, they have been subordinated to civilized life. They are by nature a religious people. They have received an education in the Christian faith from devout teachers of their own and of the dominant race. Some have been taught (let us believe it) by the precepts of Christian masters, and some by the children of those masters, repeating the lessons of the Sabbath-school. The slaveholders assure us that they have all been well treated. If that be so, they have no wrongs to avenge. Associated with our army, they would conform to the stronger and more disciplined race. Nor is this view disproved by servile insurrections. In those cases, the insurgents, without arms, without allies, without discipline, but throwing themselves against society, against government, against everything, saw no other escape than to devastate and destroy without mercy in order to get a foothold. If they exterminated, it was because extermination was threatened against them. In the Revolution, in the army at Cambridge, from the beginning to the close of the war, against the protests of South Carolina by the voice of Edward Rutledge, but with the express sanction of Washington,—ever just, ever grateful for patriotism, whencesoever it came,—the negroes fought in the ranks with the white men, and they never dishonored the patriot cause. So also at the defence of New Orleans they received from General Jackson a noble tribute to their fidelity and soldier-like bearing. Weighing the question historically and reflectively, and anticipating the capture of Richmond and New Orleans, there need be more serious apprehension of the conduct of some of our own troops recruited in large cities than of a regiment of contrabands officered and disciplined by white men.

But as events travel faster than laws or proclamations, already in this war with Rebellion the two races have served together. The same breastworks have been built by their common toil. True and valiant, they stood side by side in the din of cannonade, and they shared as comrades in the victory of Hatteras. History will not fail to record that on the 28th day of August, 1861, when the Rebel forts were bombarded by the Federal army and navy, under the command of Major-General Butler and Commodore Stringham, fourteen negroes, lately Virginia slaves, now contraband of war, faithfully and without panic worked the after-gun of the upper deck of the Minnesota, and hailed with a victor's pride the Stars and Stripes as they again waved on the soil of the Carolinas.

THE WASHERS OF THE SHROUD

  Along a river-side, I know not where,  I walked last night in mystery of dream;  A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,  To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam  Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.  Pale fire-flies pulsed within the meadow mist  Their halos, wavering thistle-downs of light;  The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst,  Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright,  Like Odin's hounds, fled baying down the night.  Then all was silent, till there smote my ear  A movement in the stream that checked my breath:  Was it the slow plash of a wading deer?  But something said, "This water is of Death!  The Sisters wash a Shroud,—ill thing to hear!"  I, looking then, beheld the ancient Three,  Known to the Greek's and to the Norseman's creed,  That sit in shadow of the mystic Tree,  Still crooning, as they weave their endless brede,  One song: "Time was, Time is, and Time shall be."  No wrinkled crones were they, as I had deemed,  But fair as yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,  To mourner, lover, poet, ever seemed;  Something too deep for joy, too high for sorrow,  Thrilled in their tones and from their faces gleamed.  "Still men and nations reap as they have strawn,"—  So sang they, working at their task the while,—  "The fatal raiment must be cleansed ere dawn:  For Austria? Italy? the Sea-Queen's Isle?  O'er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?  "Or is it for a younger, fairer corse,  That gathered States for children round his knees,  That tamed the wave to be his posting-horse,  The forest-feller, linker of the seas,  Bridge-builder, hammerer, youngest son of Thor's?  "What make we, murmur'st thou, and what are we?  When empires must be wound, we bring the shroud,  The time-old web of the implacable Three:  Is it too coarse for him, the young and proud?  Earth's mightiest deigned to wear it; why not he?"  "Is there no hope?" I moaned. "So strong, so fair!  Our Fowler, whose proud bird would brook erewhile  No rival's swoop in all our western air!  Gather the ravens, then, in funeral file,  For him, life's morn-gold bright yet in his hair?  "Leave me not hopeless, ye unpitying dames!  I see, half-seeing. Tell me, ye who scanned  The stars, Earth's elders, still must noblest aims  Be traced upon oblivious ocean-sands?  Must Hesper join the wailing ghosts of names?"  "When grass-blades stiffen with red battle-dew,  Ye deem we choose the victors and the slain:  Say, choose we them that shall be leal and true  To the heart's longing, the high faith of brain?  Yet here the victory is, if ye but knew.  "Three roots bear up Dominion: Knowledge, Will,—  These two are strong, but stronger yet the third,—  Obedience, the great tap-root, that still,  Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred,  Though the storm's ploughshare spend its utmost skill.  "Is the doom sealed for Hesper? 'T is not we  Denounce it, but the Law before all time:  The brave makes danger opportunity;  The waverer, paltering with the chance sublime,  Dwarfs it to peril: which shall Hesper be?  "Hath he let vultures climb his eagle's seat  To make Jove's bolts purveyors of their maw?  Hath he the Many's plaudits found more sweet  Than wisdom? held Opinion's wind for law?  Then let him hearken for the headsman's feet!  "Rough are the steps, slow-hewn in flintiest rock,  States climb to power by; slippery those with gold  Down which they stumble to eternal mock:  No chafferer's hand shall long the sceptre hold,  Who, given a Fate to shape, would sell the block.  "We sing old sagas, songs of weal and woe,  Mystic because too cheaply understood;  Dark sayings are not ours; men hear and know,  See Evil weak, see only strong the Good,  Yet hope to balk Doom's fire with walls of tow.  "Time Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is,  That offers choice of glory and of gloom;  The solver makes Time Shall Be surely his.—  But hasten, Sisters! for even now the tomb  Grates its slow hinge and calls from the abyss."  "But not for him," I cried, "not yet for him,  Whose large horizon, westering, star by star  Wins from the void to where on ocean's rim  The sunset shuts the world with golden bar,—  Not yet his thews shall fail, his eye grow dim!  "His shall be larger manhood, saved for those  That walk unblenching through the trial-fires;  Not suffering, but faint heart is worst of woes,  And he no base-born son of craven sires,  Whose eye need droop, confronted with his foes.  "Tears may be ours, but proud, for those who win  Death's royal purple in the enemy's lines:  Peace, too, brings tears; and 'mid the battle-din,  The wiser ear some text of God divines;  For the sheathed blade may rust with darker sin.  "God, give us peace!—not such as lulls to sleep,  But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!  And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,  Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,  And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!"  So said I, with clenched hands and passionate pain,  Thinking of dear ones by Potomac's side:  Again the loon laughed, mocking; and again  The echoes bayed far down the night, and died,  While waking I recalled my wandering brain.* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Sermons preached in the Chapel of Harvard College. By JAMES WALKER, D.D. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

The great reputation which Dr. Walker has long enjoyed, as one of the most impressive pulpit orators of the country, will suffer little diminution by the publication of these specimens of his rare powers of statement, argument, and illustration. To the general reader, they are, to be sure, deprived of the fascination of his voice and manner; but as the peculiarities of his elocution have their source in the peculiarities of his mental and moral organization, it will be found that the style and structure of these printed sermons suggest the mule of their delivery, which is simply the emphatic utterance of emphatic thought. The Italicized words, with which the volume abounds, palpably mark the results of thinking, and arrest attention because they are not less emphasized by the intellect than by the type. In reflecting Dr. Walker's mind, the work at the same time reflects his manner.

Every reader of these sermons will be struck by their thorough reasonableness,—a reasonableness which does not exclude, but includes, the deepest and warmest religious sensibility. Moral and religious feeling pervades every statement; but the feeling is still confined within a flexible framework of argument, which, while it enlarges with every access of emotion, is always an outlying boundary of thought, beyond which passion does not pass. Light continually asserts itself as more comprehensive in its reach than heat; and the noblest spiritual instincts and impulses are never allowed unchecked expression as sentiments, but have to submit to the restraints imposed by principles. Even in the remarkable sermon entitled, "The Heart more than the Head," it will be found that it is the head which legitimates the action of the heart. The sentiments are exalted above the intellect by a process purely intellectual, and the inferiority of the reason is shown to be a principle essentially reasonable. Thus, throughout the volume, the author's mental insight into the complex phenomena of our spiritual nature is always accompanied by a mental oversight of its actual and possible aberrations. A sound, large, "round-about" common sense, keen, eager, vigilant, sagacious, encompasses all the emotional elements of his thought. He has a subtile sense of mystery, but he is not a mystic. The most marvellous workings of the Divine Spirit he apprehends under the conditions of Law, and even in the raptures of devotion he never forgets the relation of cause and effect.

The style of these sermons is what might be expected from the character of the mind it expresses. If Dr. Walker were not a thinker, it is plain that he could never have been a rhetorician. He has no power at all as a writer, if writing be considered an accomplishment which can be separated from earnest thinking. Words are, with him, the mere instruments for the expression of things; and he hits on felicitous words only under that impatient stress of thought which demands exact expression for definite ideas. All his words, simple as they are, are therefore fairly earned, and he gives to them a force and significance which they do not bear in the dictionary. The mind of the writer is felt beating and burning beneath his phraseology, stamping every word with the image of a thought. Largeness of intellect, acute discrimination, clear and explicit statement, masterly arrangement of matter, an unmistakable performance of the real business of expression,—these qualities make every reader of the sermons conscious that a mind of great vigor, breadth, and pungency is brought into direct contact with his own. The almost ostentatious absence of "fine writing" only increases the effect of the plain and sinewy words.

If we pass from the form to the substance of Dr. Walker's teachings, we shall find that his sermons are especially characterized by practical wisdom. A scholar, a moralist, a metaphysician, a theologian, learned in all the lore and trained in the best methods of the schools, he is distinguished from most scholars by his broad grasp of every-day life. It is this quality which has given him his wide influence as a preacher, and this is a prominent charm of his printed sermons. He brings principles to the test of facts, and connects thoughts with things. The conscience which can easily elude the threats, the monitions, and the appeals of ordinary sermonizers, finds itself mastered by his mingled fervor, logic, and practical knowledge. Every sermon in the present volume is good for use, and furnishes both inducements and aids to the formation of manly Christian character. There is much, of course, to lift the depressed and inspire the weak; but the great peculiarity of the discourses is the resolute energy with which they grapple with the worldliness and sin of the proud and the strong.

The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard. By the COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT, Member of the French Academy. Authorized Translation. Volumes I. and II. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons. 1861. 8vo. pp. xii. and 515, 549.

These volumes form the first instalment of a work in which one of the great lights of the Romish Church in our day proposes to recount the glories of Western Monasticism, and to narrate the lives of some of the remarkable men who successively passed from the cloister to the Papal throne, or in positions scarcely less conspicuous permanently affected the history of the Church. His original design, however, does not appear to have extended beyond writing the life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, which he intended to make in some measure a complement to his life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. But he judged rightly, that, in order to exhibit the character and influence of that remarkable man under all their various aspects, it was needful at the outset to retrace the early history of monastic institutions in the West, and to show how far they tended to prepare the way for such a man. Only a part of this preliminary task has been accomplished as yet; but enough has been done to show in what spirit the historian has approached his subject, how thoroughly he has explored the original sources of information, and what will probably be the real worth of his labors. For such a work Montalembert possesses adequate and in some respects peculiar qualifications. His learning, eloquence, and candor will be conceded by every one who is familiar with his previous writings or with his public life; and at the same time he unites a passionate love of liberty, everywhere apparent in his book, with a zeal for the Church, worthy of any of the monks whom he commemorates. While his narrative is always animated and picturesque, and often rises into passages of fervid eloquence, he has conducted his researches with the unwearied perseverance of a mere antiquary, and has exhausted every source of information. "Every word which I have written," he says, "has been drawn from original and contemporary sources; and if I have quoted facts or expressions from second-hand authors, it has never been without attentively verifying the original or completing the text. A single date, quotation, or note, apparently insignificant, has often cost me hours and sometimes days of labor. I have never contented myself with being approximately right, nor resigned myself to doubt until every chance of arriving at certainty was exhausted." To the spirit and temper in which the book is written no well-founded exception can be taken; but considerable abatement must be made from the author's estimate of the services rendered by the monks to Christian civilization, and no Protestant will accept his views as to the permanent worth of monastic institutions. With this qualification, and with some allowance for needless repetitions, we cannot but regard his work as a most attractive and eloquent contribution to ecclesiastical history.