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Week Two: Freedom and the Gilded Age

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Crosscurrents Freedom and the Gilded Age

CROSSCURRENTS Freedom and the Gilded Age

Once the storm of the Civil War had passed, American skies brightened over aland of renewed promise and challenge. Freedom from armed conflict brought new freedoms of movement and opportunity. Ever-expanding railroads carried passengers and goods over vast tracts with a speed undreamed of in the days of horses and canal boats. Telegraph wires cut the days and weeks of earlier communication to minutes and hours.

Northern industries thrived. McCormick’s reaper enabled a rapid expansion of gigantic fields of midwestern wheat. As commerce flourished and banks multiplied, an economy of untested and largely unregulated opportunity engendered a new class of wealthy Americans, some of whom owed their riches to an environment rife with opportunism and graft.

Left with a broken economy and a wrecked system of labor, the South profited little from these changes. Plantation owners found the economics of the new agri- culture difficult or impossible. Slaves, accustomed to a scale of living far removed from the wealth of both the Old South and the new industrial North, scarcely knew how to assess the possibilities of freedom. Poor but unshackled, they dreamed dreams the nation found difficult or impossible to accommodate. Reconstruction briefly provided opportunities of upward mobility (the first African Americans elected to the United States Senate were southerners), but reluctance and festering wounds soon forced the races toward nominal “separate but equal” social codes that resolved immediate tensions even as they masked long-term inequities and in- justices.

The following selections provide brief perspectives on the first two decades after the war’s end in 1865. Walt Whitman and Henry Adams discuss the brass that too often lay beneath the surface glitter of the Gilded Age. George Washing- ton Cable and Booker T. Washington examine racial challenges and accommoda- tions that accompanied emancipation in the South.

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass rings with the enthusi- asm of a poet newly proficient in his powers, confident of his and his country’s greatness. After the Civil War, in his prose pamphlet Democratic Vistas (1871), the bright future he earlier envisioned is darkened by somber tones of admonish- ment in a time gone wrong.

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From Democratic Vistas

* * * It may be claim’d (and I admit the weight of the claim) that common and general worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with all life’s material com- forts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our republic is, in performance, really enacting today the grandest arts, poems, etc., by beating up the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, etc. And it may be ask’d, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any utterances even of greatest rhapsode, artist, or literatus?

I too hail those achievements with pride and joy: then answer that the soul of man will not with such only—nay, not with such at all—be finally satisfied; but needs what, (standing on these and on all things, as the feet stand on the ground), is addressed to the loftiest, to itself alone.

Out of such considerations, such truths, arises for treatment in these Vistas the important question of character, of an American stock-personality, with litera- tures and arts for outlets and return-expressions, and, of course, to correspond, within outlines common to all. To these, the main affair, the thinkers of the United States, in general so acute, have either given feeblest attention, or have remain’d, and remain, in a state of somnolence.

For my part, I would alarm and caution even the political and business reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, industry, etc. (desirable and precious advantages as they all are), do, of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the fruitage of success. With such advantages at present fully, or almost fully, pos- sess’d—the Union just issued, victorious, from the struggle with the only foes it need ever fear (namely, those within itself, the interior ones), and with unprece- dented materialistic advancement—society, in these States, is canker’d, crude, su- perstitious and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and private, or voluntary society, is also. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most impor- tant, the verteber to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled or ungrown.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physi- cian diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself be- liev’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investi- gate frauds, has talked much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the

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business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents, and moneymaking is our magician’s serpent, re- maining today sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discover’d, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the an- tique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex’d Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. * * *

1871

HENRY ADAMS (1838–1918)

The great-grandson and grandson of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams won fame as a historian, novelist, and memoirist. In his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams (1907), he considered the ways in which his patrician upbringing failed to prepare him for life in the rapidly changing world of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The following passages refer to his early years in Washington during the Grant administration, a period famous for its political corruption. Referring to himself in the third person, Adams distances his younger self from the older and wiser man he has become.

From The Education of Henry Adams

Chapter XVII: President Grant (1869)

* * * One seldom can see much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal’s way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in politics since 1860.

At least four-fifths of the American people—Adams among the rest—had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency, and probably had been

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more or less affected in their choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to orga- nize a government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize his de- partments. The task of bringing the Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion, es- pecially in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but the gen- eral disposition was good, and every one had echoed the famous phrase: “Let us have peace.”

Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this reliance on Grant was unrea- sonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one’s guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good in- tentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in deal- ing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!” Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contra- dict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the av- erage Congressman of 1869—he saw little or nothing of later ones—but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?” This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extrav- agance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson1 that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent rea- son. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope that any Presi- dent chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The newspaper-

1. Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), seventeenth president of the United States. The men named below are Charles Sumner, U.S. senator from Massachusetts; Roscoe Conkling, U.S. representative and senator from New York; James A. Garfield (1831–1881), twentieth president, March–September 1881 (assassi- nated); James G. Blaine, Garfield’s secretary of state; William McKinley (1843–1901), twenty-fifth pres- ident, 1897–1901 (assassinated); John Hay, secretary of state to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

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man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his person feels best satis- fied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later inevitable. He meant to support the executive in attacking the Senate and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920.

With this thought in mind, he went to the Capitol to hear the names an- nounced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of Grant’s Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant’s nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total miscon- ception of life—another inconceivable false start. Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant’s nom- inations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier might be a baby politician. * * *

Badeau2 took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of study among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intel- lectual or unintellectual type—Garibaldi.3 Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of them- selves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in out- ward appearance; always needing stimulants; but for whom action was the highest stimulant—the instinct of fight. * * *

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only an un- certain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand near, like Rawlins,4 and prac- tice more or less sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual caliber, to

2. Adam Badeau (1831–1895), Washington newspaperman, had served in the army with Grant and later became a diplomat and writer. 3. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), Italian patriot and general. 4. John Aaron Rawlins (1831–1869) had served with Grant during the Civil War and became his secre- tary of war.

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commonplaces when at a loss for expression: “Let us have peace!” or, “The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it”; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee5 betrayed the same intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Tere- bratula,6 as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexan- der the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washing- ton to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth- century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins. Darwinists ought to conclude that America was re- verting to the stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution. Grant’s administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American. Not an offi- cial in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in Sep- tember, suggested an American idea. * * *

1907

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844–1925)

In its first issue for 1885, the Century magazine carried an excerpt from Huckle- berry Finn, featuring Huck and Jim discussing wealth and power, and with it Cable’s essay “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” on the moral imperative to achieve a level of full freedom and equal treatment for ex-slaves, who as freedmen found themselves still bound by chains of discrimination and economic servitude. Al- though he wrote as a son and grandson of slaveholders and a veteran who served in the Confederate army from 1862, when he turned eighteen, until the end of the war in 1865, his sentiments were too strong for southerners still feeling the sting of military defeat and laboring under the hardships of Reconstruction. No longer comfortable in Louisiana, he moved to Massachusetts in the same year that the essay appeared.

5. Lee (1807–1870) was commander in chief of the Confederate army in the Civil War. 6. Ancient brachiopod, little changed by evolution.

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From The Freedman’s Case in Equity

[The Perpetual Alien]

* * * Generations of American nativity made no difference; his children and children’s children were born in sight of our door, yet the old notion held fast. He increased to vast numbers, but it never wavered. He accepted our dress, language, religion, all the fundamentals of our civilization, and became forever expatriated from his own land; still he remained, to us, an alien. Our sentiment went blind. It did not see that gradually, here by force and there by choice, he was fulfilling a host of conditions that earned at least a solemn moral right to that naturalization which no one at first had dreamed of giving him. Frequently he even bought back the freedom of which he had been robbed, became a tax-payer, and at times an educa- tor of his children at his own expense; but the old idea of alienism passed laws to banish him, his wife, and children by thousands from the state, and threw him into loathsome jails as a common felon for returning to his native land.

It will be wise to remember that these were the acts of an enlightened, God- fearing people, the great mass of whom have passed beyond all earthly account- ability. They were our fathers. I am the son and grandson of slave-holders. These were their faults; posterity will discover ours; but these things must be frankly, fearlessly taken into account if we are ever to understand the true interests of our peculiar state of society.

Why, then, did this notion that the man of color must always remain an alien stand so unshaken? We may readily recall how, under ancient systems, he rose not only to high privileges, but often to public station and power. Singularly, with us the trouble lay in a modern principle of liberty. The whole idea of American gov- ernment rested on all men’s equal, inalienable right to secure their life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by governments founded in their own consent. Hence, our Southern forefathers, shedding their blood, or ready to shed it, for this prin- ciple, yet proposing in equal good conscience to continue holding the American black man and mulatto and quadroon in slavery, had to anchor that conscience, their conduct, and their laws in the conviction that the man of African tincture was, not by his master’s arbitrary assertion merely, but by nature and unalterably, an alien. If that hold should break, one single wave of irresistible inference would lift our whole Southern social fabric and dash it upon the rocks of negro emanci- pation and enfranchisement. How was it made secure? Not by books, though they were written among us from every possible point of view, but, with the mass of our slave-owners, by the calm hypothesis of a positive, intuitive knowledge. To them the statement was an axiom. They abandoned the methods of moral and in- tellectual reasoning, and fell back upon this assumption of a God-given instinct, nobler than reason, and which it was an insult to a freeman to ask him to prove on logical grounds.

Yet it was found not enough. The slave multiplied. Slavery was a dangerous institution. Few in the South to-day have any just idea how often the slave plotted for his freedom. Our Southern ancestors were a noble, manly people, springing from some of the most highly intelligent, aspiring, upright, and refined nations of the modern world; from the Huguenot, the French Chevalier, the Old Englander, the New Englander. Their acts were not always right; whose are? But for their

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peace of mind they had to believe them so. They therefore spoke much of the negro’s contentment with that servile condition for which nature had designed him. Yet there was no escaping the knowledge that we dared not trust the slave caste with any power that could be withheld from them. So the perpetual alien was made also a perpetual menial, and the belief became fixed that this, too, was nature’s decree, not ours.

Thus we stood at the close of the civil war. There were always a few South- erners who did not justify slavery, and many who cared nothing whether it was just or not. But what we have described was the general sentiment of good South- ern people. * * *

It is the fashion to say we paused to let the “feelings engendered by the war” pass away, and that they are passing. But let not these truths lead us into error. The sentiments we have been analyzing, and upon which we saw the old compul- sory reconstruction go hard aground—these are not the “feelings engendered by the war.” We must disentangle them from the “feelings engendered by the war,” and by reconstruction. They are older than either. But for them slavery would have perished of itself, and emancipation and reconstruction been peaceful revolutions.

Indeed, as between master and slave, the “feelings engendered by the war” are too trivial, or at least were too short-lived, to demand our present notice. One relation and feeling the war destroyed: the patriarchal tie and its often really ten- der and benevolent sentiment of dependence and protection. When the slave be- came a freedman the sentiment of alienism became for the first time complete. The abandonment of this relation was not one-sided; the slave, even before the master, renounced it. Countless times, since reconstruction began, the master has tried, in what he believed to be everybody’s interest, to play on that old sentiment. But he found it a harp without strings. The freedman could not formulate, but he could see, all our old ideas of autocracy and subserviency, of master and menial, of an arbitrarily fixed class to guide and rule, and another to be guided and ruled. He rejected the overture. The old master, his well-meant condescensions slighted, turned away estranged, and justified himself in passively withholding that simpler protection without patronage which any one American citizen, however exalted, owes to any other, however humble. Could the freedman in the bitterest of those days have consented to throw himself upon just that one old relation, he could have found a physical security for himself and his house such as could not, after years of effort, be given him by constitutional amendments, Congress, United States marshals, regiments of regulars, and ships of war. But he could not; the very nobility of the civilization that had held him in slavery had made him too much a man to go back to that shelter; and by his manly neglect to do so he has proved to us who once ruled over him that, be his relative standing among the races of men what it may, he is worthy to be free.

To be a free man is his still distant goal. Twice he has been a freedman. In the days of compulsory reconstruction he was freed in the presence of his master by that master’s victorious foe. In these days of voluntary reconstruction he is virtu- ally freed by the consent of his master, but the master retaining the exclusive right to define the bounds of his freedom. Many everywhere have taken up the idea that this state of affairs is the end to be desired and the end actually sought in recon- struction as handed over to the States. I do not charge such folly to the best intelli- gence of any American community; but I cannot ignore my own knowledge that the average thought of some regions rises to no better idea of the issue. The belief

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is all too common that the nation, having aimed at a wrong result and missed, has left us of the Southern States to get now such other result as we think best. I say this belief is not universal. There are those among us who see that America has no room for a state of society which makes its lower classes harmless by abridging their liberties, or, as one of the favored class lately said to me, has “got ’em so they don’t give no trouble.” There is a growing number who see that the one thing we cannot afford to tolerate at large is a class of people less than citizens; and that every interest in the land demands that the freedman be free to become in all things, as far as his own personal gifts will lift and sustain him, the same sort of American citizen he would be if, with the same intellectual and moral caliber, he were white.

Thus we reach the ultimate question of fact. Are the freedman’s liberties suf- fering any real abridgment? The answer is easy. The letter of the laws, with but few exceptions, recognizes him as entitled to every right of an American citizen; and to some it may seem unimportant that there is scarcely one public relation of life in the South where he is not arbitrarily and unlawfully compelled to hold to- ward the white man the attitude of an alien, a menial, and a probable reprobate, by reason of his race and color. One of the marvels of future history will be that it was counted a small matter, by a majority of our nation, for six millions of people within it, made by its own decree a component part of it, to be subjected to a sys- tem of oppression so rank that nothing could make it seem small except the fact that they had already been ground under it for a century and a half.

Examine it. It proffers to the freedman a certain security of life and property, and then holds the respect of the community, that dearest of earthly boons, be- yond his attainment. It gives him certain guarantees against thieves and robbers, and then holds him under the unearned contumely of the mass of good men and women. It acknowledges in constitutions and statutes his title to an American’s freedom and aspirations, and then in daily practice heaps upon him in every public place the most odious distinctions, without giving ear to the humblest plea con- cerning mental or moral character. It spurns his ambition, tramples upon his lan- guishing self-respect, and indignantly refuses to let him either buy with money, or earn by any excellence of inner life or outward behavior, the most momentary im- munity from these public indignities even for his wife and daughters. Need we cram these pages with facts in evidence, as if these were charges denied and re- quiring to be proven? They are simply the present avowed and defended state of affairs peeled of its exteriors. * * *

The South stands on her honor before the clean equities of the issue. It is no longer whether constitutional amendments, but whether the eternal principles of justice, are violated. And the answer must—it shall—come from the South. And it shall be practical. It will not cost much. We have had a strange experience: the withholding of simple rights has cost us much blood; such concessions of them as we have made have never yet cost a drop. The answer is coming. Is politics in the way? Then let it clear the track or get run over, just as it prefers. But, as I have said over and over to my brethren in the South, I take upon me to say again here, that there is a moral and intellectual intelligence there which is not going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punc- tilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equality which it is every people’s duty before God to seek, not along the line of politics,—God forbid!— but across it and across it and across it as many times as it may lie across the path,

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until the whole people of every once slaveholding State can stand up as one man, saying, “Is the freedman a free man?” and the whole world shall answer, “Yes.” 1885

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856–1915)

Born a slave in West Virginia, Booker T. Washington became one of the most in- fluential men of his time. He was educated at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a Re- construction effort (the school was founded in 1868) to bring industrial education to the new southern freedmen. Seeking the most practical path for the advance- ment of his race, he preached a goal of economic self-sufficiency that would take precedence over the struggle for political and civil rights, which seemed to him unattainable in his time. Endorsing the concept of “separate but equal,” he sug- gested that “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Institute, an Alabama school devoted to indus- trial education and teacher training, and from that built a national web of schools and newspapers devoted to the betterment of African Americans. He published his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901. Two years later, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois began a historic revolt against the Washington ap- proach as too accommodating to white culture, and in 1909 the NAACP was born.

From Up from Slavery

The Struggle for an Education

* * * As soon as possible after reaching the grounds of the Hampton Institute, I pre- sented myself before the head teacher for assignment to a class. Having been so long without proper food, a bath, and change of clothing, I did not, of course, make a very favourable impression upon her, and I could see at once that there were doubts in her mind about the wisdom of admitting me as a student. I felt that I could hardly blame her if she got the idea that I was a worthless loafer or tramp. For some time she did not refuse to admit me, neither did she decide in my favour, and I continued to linger about her, and to impress her in all the ways I could with my worthiness. In the meantime I saw her admitting other students, and that added greatly to my discomfort, for I felt, deep down in my heart, that I could do as well as they, if I could only get a chance to show what was in me.

After some hours had passed, the head teacher said to me: “The adjoining recitation-room needs sweeping. Take the broom and sweep it.”

It occurred to me at once that here was my chance. Never did I receive an order with more delight. I knew that I could sweep, for Mrs. Ruffner1 had thor- oughly taught me how to do that when I lived with her.

I swept the recitation-room three times. Then I got a dusting-cloth and I dusted it four times. All the woodwork around the walls, every bench, table, and

1. Washington had worked about “a year and a half” for Mrs. Viola Ruffner, “a ‘Yankee’ woman from Vermont,” the wife of the owner of a West Virginia coal mine, where Washington had worked earlier.

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desk, I went over four times with my dusting-cloth. Besides, every piece of furni- ture had been moved and every closet and corner in the room had been thoroughly cleaned. I had the feeling that in a large measure my future depended upon the im- pression I made upon the teacher in the cleaning of that room. When I was through, I reported to the head teacher. She was a “Yankee” woman who knew just where to look for dirt. She went into the room and inspected the floor and closets; then she took her handkerchief and rubbed it on the woodwork about the walls, and over the table and benches. When she was unable to find one bit of dirt on the floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture, she quietly remarked, “I guess you will do to enter this institution.”

I was one of the happiest souls on earth. The sweeping of that room was my college examination, and never did any youth pass an examination for entrance into Harvard or Yale that gave him more genuine satisfaction. I have passed sev- eral examinations since then, but I have always felt that this was the best one I ever passed. * * *

The sweeping of the recitation-room in the manner that I did it seems to have paved the way for me to get through Hampton. Miss Mary F. Mackie, the head teacher, offered me a position as janitor. This, of course, I gladly accepted, because it was a place where I could work out nearly all the cost of my board. The work was hard and taxing, but I stuck to it. I had a large number of rooms to care for, and had to work late into the night, while at the same time I had to rise by four o’clock in the morning, in order to build the fires and have a little time in which to prepare my lessons. In all my career at Hampton, and ever since I have been out in the world, Miss Mary F. Mackie, the head teacher to whom I have referred, proved one of my strongest and most helpful friends. Her advice and encourage- ment were always helpful and strengthening to me in the darkest hour.

I have spoken of the impression that was made upon me by the buildings and general appearance of the Hampton Institute, but I have not spoken of that which made the greatest and most lasting impression upon me, and that was a great man—the noblest, rarest human being that it has ever been my privilege to meet. I refer to the late General Samuel C. Armstrong.2

It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are called great char- acters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from the degrading influences of the slave plantation and the coal-mines, it was a rare privilege for me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I went into his presence he made the impression upon me of being a perfect man; I was made to feel that there was something about him that was superhuman. It was my privilege to know the General personally from the time I entered Hampton till he died, and the more I saw of him the greater he grew in my estimation. One might have re- moved from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education. The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact

2. Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–1893). A major general in the Union army in the Civil War, he became an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau in Virginia and was instrumental in founding Hampton In- stitute.

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with great men and women. Instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things!

* * * After having been for a while at Hampton, I found myself in difficulty because I did not have books and clothing. Usually, however, I got around the trouble about books by borrowing from those who were more fortunate than my- self. As to clothes, when I reached Hampton I had practically nothing. Everything that I possessed was in a small hand satchel. My anxiety about clothing was in- creased because of the fact that General Armstrong made a personal inspection of the young men in ranks, to see that their clothes were clean. Shoes had to be pol- ished, there must be no buttons off the clothing, and no grease-spots. To wear one suit of clothes continually, while at work and in the schoolroom, and at the same time keep it clean, was rather a hard problem for me to solve. In some way I man- aged to get on till the teachers learned that I was in earnest and meant to succeed, and then some of them were kind enough to see that I was partly supplied with second-hand clothing that had been sent in barrels from the North. These barrels proved a blessing to hundreds of poor but deserving students. Without them I question whether I should ever have gotten through Hampton.

When I first went to Hampton I do not recall that I had ever slept in a bed that had two sheets on it. In those days there were not many buildings there, and room was very precious. There were seven other boys in the same room with me; most of them, however, students who had been there for some time. The sheets were quite a puzzle to me. The first night I slept under both of them, and the second night I slept on top of both of them; but by watching the other boys I learned my lesson in this, and have been trying to follow it ever since and to teach it to others.

I was among the youngest of the students who were in Hampton at that time. Most of the students were men and women—some as old as forty years of age. As I now recall the scene of my first year, I do not believe that one often has the op- portunity of coming into contact with three or four hundred men and women who were so tremendously in earnest as these men and women were. Every hour was occupied in study or work. Nearly all had had enough actual contact with the world to teach them the need of education. Many of the older ones were, of course, too old to master the text-books very thoroughly, and it was often sad to watch their struggles; but they made up in earnestness much of what they lacked in books. Many of them were as poor as I was, and, besides having to wrestle with their books, they had to struggle with a poverty which prevented their having the necessities of life. Many of them had aged parents who were dependent upon them, and some of them were men who had wives whose support in some way they had to provide for.

The great and prevailing idea that seemed to take possession of every one was to prepare himself to lift up the people at his home. No one seemed to think of himself. And the officers and teachers, what a rare set of human beings they were! They worked for the students night and day, in season and out of season. They seemed happy only when they were helping the students in some manner. When- ever it is written—and I hope it will be—the part that the Yankee teachers played in the education of the Negroes immediately after the war will make one of the most thrilling parts of the history of this country. The time is not far distant when the whole South will appreciate this service in a way that it has not yet been able to do.

1901

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Sarah Orne Jewett Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)

R Berwick, Maine, had once been a thriving inland seaport, but at the time of Sarah Orne Jewett’s birth, the region was in decline. The shipbuilding and fishing that had been its economic base were mostly gone, and the soil was not suitable for profitable farming. Accompanying her physician father on his rounds, Jewett saw the suffering of people whose livelihood had vanished. She was particu- larly struck by the plight of lone women, many the last remnants of once-prosperous families, liv- ing in isolation and poverty. She also observed how the increasing tide of summer tourists patronized the local people and looked down on them.

Her father was crucial to her intellectual development. Not only did she learn to observe peo- ple through his sympathetic eyes, his interest in botany and zoology helped focus her attention on her natural surroundings, and he made his extensive library of classic and contemporary writ- ers available to her.

Because of chronic ill-health in childhood, Jewett had little formal education and had to aban- don her dream of becoming a physician. Often, instead of attending classes at the local academy, she spent time with her beloved father, talked with people in the homes of his patients, read or explored the outdoors by herself. Her solitary observation, described in a letter as detail “that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper,’’ proved to be her most effective preparation as a writer.

She read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island, set on an island off the Maine coast, when she was a teenager. For Jewett the book clarified the effectiveness of focusing on a specific geographical location, and she resolved that she would portray the denizens of her world with absolute realism and no romance. She hoped to illuminate “their grand, simple lives’’ and demonstrate “that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set’’ that summer tourists took them to be. Her first short stories, published before she was twenty, appeared under the pseudonyms A. C. Eliot, Alice Eliot, and Sarah O. Sweet.

Frequently she traveled to Boston or New York, where prominent editors and authors were included among her circle of friends. Several of these men, especially James Russell Lowell, edi- tor of the Atlantic from 1857 to 1861, and his successors, James T. Fields (1861–1871) William Deen Howells (1871–1881), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1881–1890), encouraged Jewett’s career. Her story “Mr. Bruce” was published in the Atlantic in 1869, and with the encouragement of Howells she published Deephaven, her first volume of sketches, in 1877.

The death of Dr. Jewett (1878) was traumatic for his daughter, whose career as a writer was so newly begun. She dedicated Country By-Ways (1881) to him as “the best and wisest man I ever knew; who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.’’ The portrait of Dr. Leslie in A Country Doctor (1884) recreates his career; Jewett also wrote poetry expressing the desolation she felt at his loss.

With her father gone, her friendship with Annie Fields, the editor’s wife, became her most important relationship. After 1880, Jewett usually spent part of each winter in the Fields’s Boston home and part of the summer at their summer cottage at Manchester-by-the-Sea. After James Fields died in 1881, the two women regularly traveled together in Florida, the Caribbean, and Europe. In successive European trips, they met some of the prominent British and American writers of

Jewett’s fiction, in addition to titles named above, includes Old Friends and New (1879); The Mate of the Daylight and Friends Ashore (1883); A Marsh Island (1885); and The Tory Lover (1901), a historical romance. Collected editions include Stories and Tales (7 vols., 1910) and The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Willa Cather (2 vols., 1925). The Uncollected Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett was edited by Richard Cary (1971). Letters was edited by Richard Cary (1956, revised 1967).

Studies include F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (1929); Richard Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett (1962); Margaret Thorp, Sarah Orne Jewett (1966); Josephine Donovan, Sarah Orne Jewett (1980); and Sarah Way Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett, An American Persephone (1989).

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the day, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti (1882), Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mark Twain (1892), and Rudyard Kipling and Henry James (1898).

Jewett saw the villages of her region as microcosms of human experience, asserting that “the great plays of life, the comedies and tragedies, with their lovers and conspirators and clowns’’ were being constantly reenacted in farmhouses and streets. With gentle irony she reported the van- ity, greed, and jealousy, as well as the selflessness and nobility of her characters. Jewett’s collections of stories and sketches include A White Heron and Other Stories (1886); The King of Folly Island and Other People (1888); Tales of New England (1890); Strangers and Wayfarers (1890), the source of the story reprinted below; A Native of Winby and Other Tales (1893); The Life of Nancy (1895); and The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories (1899). Some stories were published in more than one collection. Her best known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared in 1896. Set in Dunnet Landing, a coastal village, it is narrated by a sympathetic summer visitor who encourages the inhab- itants to recount their own experiences.

After a fall from a carriage in 1902, in which her head and spine were injured, Jewett’s career as a writer was effectively ended, but she continued to carry on an active correspondence and travel to visit friends until her death following a stroke.

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Sarah Orne Jewett A White Heron © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

A White Heron1

The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking crea- ture in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from whatever light there was, and striking deep into the woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not.

There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide her- self away among the huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring. So Sylvia had to hunt for her until she found her, and call Co’! Co’! with never an answering Moo, until her childish patience was quite spent. If the creature had not given good milk and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her owners. Besides, Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it. Sometimes in pleasant weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow’s pranks as an intelli- gent attempt to play hide and seek, and as the child had no playmates she lent her- self to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had been so long that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia had only laughed when she came upon Mistress Moolly at the swampside, and urged her affectionately homeward with a twig of birch leaves. The old cow was not inclined to wander farther, she even turned in the right direction for once as they left the pasture, and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready to be milked now, and seldom stopped to browse. Sylvia wondered what her grand- mother would say because they were so late. It was a great while since she had left home at half-past five o’clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making this er- rand a short one. Mrs. Tilley had chased the horned torment too many summer evenings herself to blame any one else for lingering, and was only thankful as she waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such valuable assistance. The good woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made! Every- body said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often with wistful compassion of a wretched geranium that belonged to a town neighbor.

“‘Afraid of folks,’” old Mrs. Tilley said to herself, with a smile, after she had made the unlikely choice of Sylvia from her daughter’s houseful of children, and was returning to the farm. “‘Afraid of folks,’ they said! I guess she won’t be trou- bled no great with ’em up to the old place!” When they reached the door of the lonely house and stopped to unlock it, and the cat came to purr loudly, and rub

1. First published in A White Heron and Other Stories, 1886, from which the present text is reprinted. Re- published in Tales of New England, 1890.

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against them, a deserted pussy, indeed, but fat with young robins, Sylvia whispered that this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home.

The companions followed the shady woodroad, the cow taking slow steps and the child very fast ones. The cow stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the pasture were not half a swamp, and Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly against her. She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying goodnight to each other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along. However, it was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves. She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on in the noisy town just the same as when she was there; the thought of the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path to escape from the shadow of the trees.

Suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive. Sylvia left the cow to what- ever sad fate might await her, and stepped discreetly aside into the bushes, but she was just too late. The enemy had discovered her, and called out in a very cheerful and persuasive tone, “Halloa, little girl, how far is it to the road?” and trembling Sylvia answered almost inaudibly, “A good ways.”

She did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man, who carried a gun over his shoulder, but she came out of her bush and again followed the cow, while he walked alongside.

“I have been hunting for some birds,” the stranger said kindly, “and I have lost my way, and need a friend very much. Don’t be afraid,” he added gallantly. “Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the night at your house, and go out gunning early in the morning.”

Sylvia was more alarmed than before. Would not her grandmother consider her much to blame? But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? It did not seem to be her fault, and she hung her head as if the stem of it were broken, but managed to answer “Sylvy,” with much effort when her companion again asked her name.

Mrs. Tilley was standing in the doorway when the trio came into view. The cow gave a loud moo by way of explanation.

“Yes, you’d better speak up for yourself, you old trial! Where’d she tucked herself away this time, Sylvy?” But Sylvia kept an awed silence; she knew by in- stinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer-lads of the region.

The young man stood his gun beside the door, and dropped a lumpy game- bag beside it; then he bade Mrs. Tilley good-evening, and repeated his wayfarer’s story, and asked if he could have a night’s lodging.

“Put me anywhere you like,” he said. “I must be off early in the morning, be- fore day; but I am very hungry, indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate, that’s plain.”

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“Dear sakes, yes,” responded the hostess, whose long slumbering hospitality seemed to be easily awakened. “You might fare better if you went out to the main road a mile or so, but you’re welcome to what we’ve got. I’ll milk right off, and you make yourself at home. You can sleep on husks or feathers,” she proffered graciously. “I raised them all myself. There’s good pasturing for geese just below here towards the ma’sh. Now step round and set a plate for the gentleman, Sylvy!” And Sylvia promptly stepped. She was glad to have something to do, and she was hungry herself.

It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens. This was the best thrift of an old-fashioned farm- stead, though on such a small scale that it seemed like a hermitage. He listened ea- gerly to the old woman’s quaint talk, he watched Sylvia’s pale face and shining gray eyes with ever growing enthusiasm, and insisted that this was the best supper he had eaten for a month, and afterward the new-made friends sat down in the door-way together while the moon came up.

Soon it would be berry-time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow was a good milker, though a plaguy thing to keep track of, the hostess gossiped frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children, so Sylvia’s mother, and a son (who might be dead) in California were all the children she had left. “Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gunning,” she explained sadly. “I never wanted for pa’tridges or gray squer’ls while he was to home. He’s been a great wand’rer, I expect, and he’s no hand to write letters. There, I don’t blame him, I’d ha’ seen the world myself if it had been so I could.”

“Sylvy takes after him,” the grandmother continued affectionately, after a minute’s pause. “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild creatures counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds. Last winter she got the jaybirds to bangeing here, and I believe she’d ’a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst ’em, if I hadn’t kep’ watch. Anything but crows, I tell her, I’m willin’ to help support—though Dan he had a tamed one o’ them that did seem to have reason same as folks. It was round here a good spell after he went away. Dan an’ his father they didn’t hitch,—but he never held up his head ag’in after Dan had dared him an’ gone off.”

The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else.

“So Sylvy knows all about birds, does she?” he exclaimed, as he looked round at the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. “I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.” (Mrs. Tilley smiled.) “There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting for these five years. I mean to get them on my own grounds if they can be found.”

“Do you cage ’em up?” asked Mrs. Tilley doubtfully, in response to this en- thusiastic announcement.

“Oh no, they’re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,” said the ornithologist, “and I have shot or snared every one myself. I caught a glimpse of a white heron a few miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this di- rection. They have never been found in this district at all. The little white heron, it

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is,” and he turned again to look at Sylvia with the hope of discovering that the rare bird was one of her acquaintances.

But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath. “You would know the heron if you saw it,” the stranger continued eagerly. “A

queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk’s nest.”

Sylvia’s heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird, and had once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass, away over at the other side of the woods. There was an open place where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud under- neath and never be heard of more. Not far beyond were the salt marshes just this side the sea itself, which Sylvia wondered and dreamed much about, but never had seen, whose great voice could sometimes be heard above the noise of the woods on stormy nights.

“I can’t think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron’s nest,” the handsome stranger was saying. “I would give ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me,” he added desperately, “and I mean to spend my whole vaca- tion hunting for it if need be. Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased out of its own region by some bird of prey.”

Mrs. Tilley gave amazed attention to all this, but Sylvia still watched the toad, not divining, as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature wished to get to its hole under the door-step, and was much hindered by the unusual spec- tators at that hour of the evening. No amount of thought, that night, could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.

The next day the young sportsman hovered about the woods, and Sylvia kept him company, having lost her first fear of the friendly lad, who proved to be most kind and sympathetic. He told her many things about the birds and what they knew and where they lived and what they did with themselves. And he gave her a jack- knife, which she thought as great a treasure as if she were a desert-islander. All day long he did not once make her troubled or afraid except when he brought down some unsuspecting singing creature from its bough. Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much. But as the day waned, Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delight- ful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love. Some premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young creatures who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care. They stopped to listen to a bird’s song; they pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches— speaking to each other rarely and in whispers; the young man going first and Sylvia following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her gray eyes dark with excitement.

She grieved because the longed-for white heron was elusive, but she did not lead the guest, she only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her—it was hard enough to answer yes or no when there was need of that. At last evening began to fall, and they drove the cow home together, and Sylvia smiled with pleasure when they came to the place where she heard the whistle and was afraid only the night before.

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Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was high- est, a great pine-tree stood, the last of its generation. Whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this old pine towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away. Sylvia knew it well. She had always believed that whoever climbed to the top of it could see the ocean; and the little girl had often laid her hand on the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully at those dark boughs that the wind always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below. Now she thought of the tree with a new excitement, for why, if one climbed it at break of day could not one see all the world, and easily discover from whence the white heron flew, and mark the place, and find the hidden nest?

What a spirit of adventure, what wild ambition! What fancied triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear.

All night the door of the little house stood open and the whippoorwills came and sang upon the very step. The young sportsman and his old hostess were sound asleep, but Sylvia’s great design kept her broad awake and watching. She forgot to think of sleep. The short summer night seemed as long as the winter darkness, and at last when the whippoorwills ceased, and she was afraid the morning would after all come too soon, she stole out of the house and followed the pasture path through the woods, hastening toward the open ground beyond, listening with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing. Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest!

There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and silly Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it, with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself. First she must mount the white oak tree that grew along- side, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak’s upper branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close together. There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the great enterprise would really begin.

She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, and took the daring step across into the old pine-tree. The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons, the pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff as she went round and round the tree’s great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn,

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yet it seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine-tree, and the child knew she must hurry if her project were to be of any use.

The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this de- termined spark of human spirit wending its way from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and frowned away the winds that June morning while the dawn grew bright in the east.

Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly tri- umphant, high in the treetop. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow- moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when one had only seen them before far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world!

The birds sang louder and louder. At last the sun came up bewilderingly bright. Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away. Where was the white heron’s nest in the sea of green branches, and was this wonderful sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height? Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marsh is set among the shining birches and dark hemlocks; there where you saw the white heron once you will see him again; look, look! a white spot of him like a single floating feather comes up from the dead hemlock and grows larger, and rises, and comes close at last, and goes by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slen- der neck and crested head. And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes, for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest and plumes his feathers for the new day!

The child gives a long sigh a minute later when a company of shouting cat- birds comes also to the tree, and vexed by their fluttering and lawlessness the solemn heron goes away. She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath. Then Sylvia, well satisfied, makes her perilous way down again, not daring to look far below the branch she stands on, ready to cry some- times because her fingers ache and her lamed feet slip. Wondering over and over again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would think when she told him how to find his way straight to the heron’s nest.

“Sylvy, Sylvy!” called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody answered, and the small husk bed was empty and Sylvia had disappeared.

The guest waked from a dream, and remembering his day’s pleasure hurried to dress himself that might it sooner begin. He was sure from the way the shy lit-

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tle girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron, and now she must really be made to tell. Here she comes now, paler than ever, and her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grand- mother and the sportsman stand in the door together and question her, and the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh.

But Sylvia does not speak after all, though the old grandmother fretfully re- bukes her, and the young man’s kind, appealing eyes are looking straight in her own. He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell.

No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.

Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed later in the day, that could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves! Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been,—who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!

1886

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Charles W. Chesnutt Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1858–1932)

“The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored peo- ple as the elevation of the whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation * * * a barrier to the moral progress of the American people.” Charles Waddell Chesnutt was twenty-two when he wrote those words. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he had grown up in Fayetteville, North Car- olina. He had begun teaching at fourteen, had published his first story in a local newspaper that same year, and embarked on a rigorous program of self-education. At twenty-five he worked briefly in New York and then moved to Cleveland, where he began a long, rewarding career as a lawyer and court stenographer.

His career as a pioneering black writer began in the 1880s, when his stories began appearing first in McClure’s newly syndicated newspaper pages and then in the Atlantic, and all but ended in 1905, when The Colonel’s Dream, his last pub- lished book, appeared. At first a writer of short stories, he experienced some early difficulty in gathering a collection that would interest a publisher, but when The Conjure Woman (1899) appeared it was followed in rapid succession by The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) and a brief Life of Fred- erick Douglass (1899). Encouraged by this success to turn his attention more fully to literature, he quickly produced three novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream. Although they enjoyed some critical success, his books did not meet his expectations in sales, and he began to immerse himself once again in court stenography. A prosperous and respected member of the Cleveland community throughout the rest of his life, he continued as a spokesman for racial justice, but he wrote little fiction. His last novel, written when he was seventy, did not find a publisher.

His one great subject was race, and although he was able to find humor as well as tragedy in it, he appeared unwilling to consider any other. In his best works, his immersion was so deep and his touch so sure that William Dean How- ells compared him to Maupassant, Turgenev, and James. Howells, however, was troubled by the bitterness that he perceived in The Marrow of Tradition, and other critics, even when they admired his skill, were sometimes hostile toward his sub- ject matter. When he turned away from fiction, it was at least partly because, as he expressed it, “I am pretty fairly convinced that the color line runs everywhere so far as the United States is concerned.”

Chesnutt’s books published during his lifetime are named above. Paul Marchand, F.M.C., 1998, is a short novel left unpublished at his death. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1974, was edited by Sylvia L. Render. William L. Andrews edited Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1992. Richard H. Brodhead edited The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1993. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz III edited To Be an Au-thor: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, 1997. McElrath, Leitz, and Jesse S. Crisler edited Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, 1999. Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, 1952, is primarily biographical. See also J. Noel Heermance, Charles W. Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist, 1974; Frances Richardson Keller, I Chose Black: The Crusade of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1978; Syl-via L. Render, Charles W. Chesnutt, 1980; and William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1980; Charles Duncan, The Absent Man: The Narrative Quest of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1998; and Dean McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, 2002.

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Charles W. Chesnutt The Passing of Grandison © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT

The Passing of Grandison1

When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything; for what a man will not do to please a woman is yet to be discovered. Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few preliminary facts to make it clear why young Dick Owens tried to run one of his father’s negro men off to Canada.

In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the con- stant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man from Ohio, moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certain bondman who happened to have a “hard master,” essayed to help the slave to freedom. The attempt was discovered and frustrated; the abductor was tried and convicted for slave-stealing, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the penitentiary. His death, after the expiration of only a small part of the sentence, from cholera con- tracted while nursing stricken fellow prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy in- terest that made it famous in anti-slavery annals.

Dick Owens had attended the trial. He was a youth of about twenty-two, in- telligent, handsome, and amiable, but extremely indolent, in a graceful and gentle- manly way; or, as old Judge Fenderson put it more than once, he was lazy as the Devil,—a mere figure of speech, of course, and not one that did justice to the Enemy of Mankind. When asked why he never did anything serious, Dick would good-naturedly reply, with a well-modulated drawl, that he did n’t have to. His father was rich; there was but one other child, an unmarried daughter, who be- cause of poor health would probably never marry, and Dick was therefore heir presumptive to a large estate. Wealth or social position he did not need to seek, for he was born to both. Charity Lomax had shamed him into studying law, but notwithstanding an hour or so a day spent at old Judge Fenderson’s office, he did not make remarkable headway in his legal studies.

“What Dick needs,” said the judge, who was fond of tropes, as became a scholar, and of horses, as was befitting a Kentuckian, “is the whip of necessity, or the spur of ambition. If he had either, he would soon need the snaffle to hold him back.”

But all Dick required, in fact, to prompt him to the most remarkable thing he accomplished before he was twenty-five, was a mere suggestion from Charity Lomax. The story was never really known to but two persons until after the war, when it came out because it was a good story and there was no particular reason for its concealment.

Young Owens had attended the trial of this slave-stealer, or martyr,—either or both,—and, when it was over, had gone to call on Charity Lomax, and, while they sat on the veranda after sundown, had told her all about the trial. He was a good

1. The source of the present text is The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899.

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talker, as his career in later years disclosed, and described the proceedings very graphically.

“I confess,” he admitted, “that while my principles were against the prisoner, my sympathies were on his side. It appeared that he was of good family, and that he had an old father and mother, respectable people, dependent upon him for sup- port and comfort in their declining years. He had been led into the matter by pity for a negro whose master ought to have been run out of the county long ago for abusing his slaves. If it had been merely a question of old Sam Briggs’s negro, no- body would have cared anything about it. But father and the rest of them stood on the principle of the thing, and told the judge so, and the fellow was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary.”

Miss Lomax had listened with lively interest. “I’ve always hated old Sam Briggs,” she said emphatically, “ever since the

time he broke a negro’s leg with a piece of cordwood. When I hear of a cruel deed it makes the Quaker blood that came from my grandmother assert itself. Person- ally I wish that all Sam Briggs’s negroes would run away. As for the young man, I regard him as a hero. He dared something for humanity. I could love a man who would take such chances for the sake of others.”

“Could you love me, Charity, if I did something heroic?” “You never will, Dick. You’re too lazy for any use. You’ll never do anything

harder than playing cards or fox-hunting.” “Oh, come now, sweetheart! I’ve been courting you for a year, and it’s the

hardest work imaginable. Are you never going to love me?” he pleaded. His hand sought hers, but she drew it back beyond his reach. “I’ll never love you, Dick Owens, until you have done something. When that

time comes, I’ll think about it.” “But it takes so long to do anything worth mentioning, and I don’t want to

wait. One must read two years to become a lawyer, and work five more to make a reputation. We shall both be gray by then.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she rejoined. “It does n’t require a lifetime for a man to prove that he is a man. This one did something, or at least tried to.”

“Well, I’m willing to attempt as much as any other man. What do you want me to do, sweetheart? Give me a test.”

“Oh, dear me!” said Charity, “I don’t care what you do, so you do something. Really, come to think of it, why should I care whether you do anything or not?”

“I’m sure I don’t know why you should, Charity,” rejoined Dick humbly, “for I’m aware that I’m not worthy of it.”

“Except that I do hate,” she added, relenting slightly, “to see a really clever man so utterly lazy and good for nothing.”

“Thank you, my dear; a word of praise from you has sharpened my wits al- ready. I have an idea! Will you love me if I run a negro off to Canada?”

“What nonsense!” said Charity scornfully. “You must be losing your wits. Steal another man’s slave, indeed, while your father owns a hundred!”

“Oh, there’ll be no trouble about that,” responded Dick lightly; “I’ll run off one of the old man’s; we’ve got too many anyway. It may not be quite as difficult as the other man found it, but it will be just as unlawful, and will demonstrate what I am capable of.”

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“Seeing’s believing,” replied Charity. “Of course, what you are talking about now is merely absurd. I’m going away for three weeks, to visit my aunt in Tennessee. If you’re able to tell me, when I return, that you’ve done something to prove your quality, I’ll—well, you may come and tell me about it.”

Young Owens got up about nine o’clock next morning, and while making his toi- let put some questions to his personal attendant, a rather bright looking young mulatto of about his own age.

“Tom,” said Dick. “Yas, Mars Dick,” responded the servant. “I’m going on a trip North. Would you like to go with me?” Now, if there was anything that Tom would have liked to make, it was a trip

North. It was something he had long contemplated in the abstract, but had never been able to muster up sufficient courage to attempt in the concrete. He was pru- dent enough, however, to dissemble his feelings.

“I would n’t min’ it, Mars Dick, ez long ez you’d take keer er me an’ fetch me home all right.”

Tom’s eyes belied his words, however, and his young master felt well assured that Tom needed only a good opportunity to make him run away. Having a com- fortable home, and a dismal prospect in case of failure, Tom was not likely to take any desperate chances; but young Owens was satisfied that in a free State but little persuasion would be required to lead Tom astray. With a very logical and charac- teristic desire to gain his end with the least necessary expenditure of effort, he de- cided to take Tom with him, if his father did not object.

Colonel Owens had left the house when Dick went to breakfast, so Dick did not see his father till luncheon.

“Father,” he remarked casually to the colonel, over the fried chicken, “I’m feeling a trifle run down. I imagine my health would be improved somewhat by a little travel and change of scene.”

“Why don’t you take a trip North?” suggested his father. The colonel added to paternal affection a considerable respect for his son as the heir of a large estate. He himself had been “raised” in comparative poverty, and had laid the founda- tions of his fortune by hard work; and while he despised the ladder by which he had climbed, he could not entirely forget it, and unconsciously manifested, in his intercourse with his son, some of the poor man’s deference toward the wealthy and well-born.

“I think I’ll adopt your suggestion, sir,” replied the son, “and run up to New York; and after I’ve been there awhile I may go on to Boston for a week or so. I’ve never been there, you know.”

“There are some matters you can talk over with my factor in New York,” re- joined the colonel, “and while you are up there among the Yankees, I hope you’ll keep your eyes and ears open to find out what the rascally abolitionists are saying and doing. They’re becoming altogether too active for our comfort, and entirely too many ungrateful niggers are running away. I hope the conviction of that fel- low yesterday may discourage the rest of the breed. I’d just like to catch any one

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trying to run off one of my darkeys. He’d get short shrift; I don’t think any Court would have a chance to try him.”

“They are a pestiferous lot,” assented Dick, “and dangerous to our institu- tions. But say, father, if I go North I shall want to take Tom with me.”

Now, the colonel, while a very indulgent father, had pronounced views on the subject of negroes, having studied them, as he often said, for a great many years, and, as he asserted oftener still, understanding them perfectly. It is scarcely worth while to say, either, that he valued more highly than if he had inherited them the slaves he had toiled and schemed for.

“I don’t think it safe to take Tom up North,” he declared, with promptness and decision. “He’s a good enough boy, but too smart to trust among those low- down abolitionists. I strongly suspect him of having learned to read, though I can’t imagine how. I saw him with a newspaper the other day, and while he pretended to be looking at a woodcut, I’m almost sure he was reading the paper. I think it by no means safe to take him.”

Dick did not insist, because he knew it was useless. The colonel would have obliged his son in any other matter, but his negroes were the outward and visible sign of his wealth and station, and therefore sacred to him.

“Whom do you think it safe to take?” asked Dick. “I suppose I’ll have to have a body-servant.”

“What’s the matter with Grandison?” suggested the colonel. “He’s handy enough, and I reckon we can trust him. He’s too fond of good eating, to risk los- ing his regular meals; besides, he’s sweet on your mother’s maid, Betty, and I’ve promised to let ’em get married before long. I’ll have Grandison up, and we’ll talk to him. Here, you boy Jack,” called the colonel to a yellow youth in the next room who was catching flies and pulling their wings off to pass the time, “go down to the barn and tell Grandison to come here.”

“Grandison,” said the colonel, when the negro stood before him, hat in hand. “Yas, marster.” “Have n’t I always treated you right?” “Yas, marster.” “Have n’t you always got all you wanted to eat?” “Yas, marster.” “And as much whiskey and tobacco as was good for you, Grandison?” “Y-a-s, marster.” “I should just like to know, Grandison, whether you don’t think yourself a

great deal better off than those poor free negroes down by the plank road, with no kind master to look after them and no mistress to give them medicine when they’re sick and—and”—

“Well, I sh’d jes’ reckon I is better off, suh, dan dem low-down free niggers, suh! Ef anybody ax ’em who dey b’long ter, dey has ter say nobody, er e’se lie er- bout it. Anybody ax me who I b’longs ter, I ain’ got no ’casion ter be shame’ ter tell ’em, no, suh, ’deed I ain’, suh!”

The colonel was beaming. This was true gratitude, and his feudal heart thrilled at such appreciative homage. What cold-blooded, heartless monsters they were who would break up this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other! The colonel always became indignant at the mere thought of such wickedness.

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“Grandison,” the colonel continued, “your young master Dick is going North for a few weeks, and I am thinking of letting him take you along. I shall send you on this trip, Grandison, in order that you may take care of your young master. He will need some one to wait on him, and no one can ever do it so well as one of the boys brought up with him on the old plantation. I am going to trust him in your hands, and I’m sure you’ll do your duty faithfully, and bring him back home safe and sound—to old Kentucky.”

Grandison grinned. “Oh yas, marster, I’ll take keer er young Mars Dick.” “I want to warn you, though, Grandison,” continued the colonel impressively,

“against these cussed abolitionists, who try to entice servants from their comfort- able homes and their indulgent masters, from the blue skies, the green fields, and the warm sunlight of their southern home, and send them away off yonder to Canada, a dreary country, where the woods are full of wildcats and wolves and bears, where the snow lies up to the eaves of the houses for six months of the year, and the cold is so severe that it freezes your breath and curdles your blood; and where, when runaway niggers get sick and can’t work, they are turned out to starve and die, unloved and uncared for. I reckon, Grandison, that you have too much sense to permit yourself to be led astray by any such foolish and wicked people.”

“’Deed, suh, I would n’ low none er dem cussed, low-down abolitioners ter come nigh me, suh. I’d—I’d—would I be ’lowed ter hit ’em, suh?”

“Certainly, Grandison,” replied the colonel, chuckling, “hit ’em as hard as you can. I reckon they’d rather like it. Begad, I believe they would! It would serve ’em right to be hit by a nigger!”

“Er ef I did n’t hit ’em, suh,” continued Grandison reflectively, “I’d tell Mars Dick, en he ’d fix ’em. He ’d smash de face off’n ’em, suh, I jes’ knows he would.”

“Oh yes, Grandison, your young master will protect you. You need fear no harm while he is near.”

“Dey won’t try ter steal me, will dey, marster?” asked the negro, with sudden alarm.

“I don’t know, Grandison,” replied the colonel, lighting a fresh cigar. “They’re a desperate set of lunatics, and there’s no telling what they may resort to. But if you stick close to your young master, and remember always that he is your best friend, and understands your real needs, and has your true interests at heart, and if you will be careful to avoid strangers who try to talk to you, you’ll stand a fair chance of getting back to your home and your friends. And if you please your master Dick, he’ll buy you a present, and a string of beads for Betty to wear when you and she get married in the fall.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, suh,” replied Grandison, oozing gratitude at every pore; “you is a good marster, to be sho’, suh; yas, ’deed you is. You kin jes’ bet me and Mars Dick gwine git ’long jes’ lack I wuz own boy ter Mars Dick. En it won’t be my fault ef he don’ want me fer his boy all de time, w’en we come back home ag’in.”

“All right, Grandison, you may go now. You need n’t work any more to-day, and here’s a piece of tobacco for you off my own plug.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de bes’ marster any nigger ever had in dis worl’.” And Grandison bowed and scraped and disappeared round the cor- ner, his jaws closing around a large section of the colonel’s best tobacco.

“You may take Grandison,” said the colonel to his son. “I allow he’s abolitionist-proof.”

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III

Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from Kentucky, registered at the fashionable New York hostelry for Southerners in those days, a hotel where an atmosphere congenial to Southern institutions was sedulously maintained. But there were negro waiters in the dining-room, and mulatto bell-boys, and Dick had no doubt that Grandison, with the native gregariousness and garrulousness of his race, would foregather and palaver with them sooner or later, and Dick hoped that they would speedily inoculate him with the virus of freedom. For it was not Dick’s in- tention to say anything to his servant about his plan to free him, for obvious rea- sons. To mention one of them, if Grandison should go away, and by legal process be recaptured, his young master’s part in the matter would doubtless become known, which would be embarrassing to Dick, to say the least. If, on the other hand, he should merely give Grandison sufficient latitude, he had no doubt he would eventually lose him. For while not exactly skeptical about Grandison’s per- fervid loyalty, Dick had been a somewhat keen observer of human nature, in his own indolent way, and based his expectations upon the force of the example and argument that his servant could scarcely fail to encounter. Grandison should have a fair chance to become free by his own initiative; if it should become necessary to adopt other measures to get rid of him, it would be time enough to act when the necessity arose; and Dick Owens was not the youth to take needless trouble.

The young master renewed some acquaintances and made others, and spent a week or two very pleasantly in the best society of the metropolis, easily accessible to a wealthy, well-bred young Southerner, with proper introductions. Young women smiled on him, and young men of convivial habits pressed their hospitali- ties; but the memory of Charity’s sweet, strong face and clear blue eyes made him proof against the blandishments of the one sex and the persuasions of the other. Meanwhile he kept Grandison supplied with pocket-money, and left him mainly to his own devices. Every night when Dick came in he hoped he might have to wait upon himself, and every morning he looked forward with pleasure to the prospect of making his toilet unaided. His hopes, however, were doomed to disap- pointment, for every night when he came in Grandison was on hand with a boot- jack, and a nightcap mixed for his young master as the colonel had taught him to mix it, and every morning Grandison appeared with his master’s boots blacked and his clothes brushed, and laid his linen out for the day.

“Grandison,” said Dick one morning, after finishing his toilet, “this is the chance of your life to go around among your own people and see how they live. Have you met any of them?”

“Yas, suh, I’s seen some of ’em. But I don’ keer nuffin fer ’em, suh. Dey ’re diffe’nt f’m de niggers down ou’ way. Dey ’lows dey ’re free, but dey ain’ got sense ’nuff ter know dey ain’ half as well off as dey would be down Souf, whar dey ’d be ’preciated.”

When two weeks had passed without any apparent effect of evil example upon Grandison, Dick resolved to go on to Boston, where he thought the atmosphere might prove more favorable to his ends. After he had been at the Revere House for a day or two without losing Grandison, he decided upon slightly different tactics.

Having ascertained from a city directory the addresses of several well-known abolitionists, he wrote them each a letter something like this:—

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DEAR FRIEND AND BROTHER:— A wicked slaveholder from Kentucky, stopping at the Revere House, has dared to in-

sult the liberty-loving people of Boston by bringing his slave into their midst. Shall this be tolerated? Or shall steps be taken in the name of liberty to rescue a fellow-man from bondage? For obvious reasons I can only sign myself,

A FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

That his letter might have an opportunity to prove effective, Dick made it a point to send Grandison away from the hotel on various errands. On one of these occasions Dick watched him for quite a distance down the street. Grandison had scarcely left the hotel when a long-haired, sharp-featured man came out behind him, followed him, soon overtook him, and kept along beside him until they turned the next corner. Dick’s hopes were roused by this spectacle, but sank corre- spondingly when Grandison returned to the hotel. As Grandison said nothing about the encounter, Dick hoped there might be some self-consciousness behind this unexpected reticence, the results of which might develop later on.

But Grandison was on hand again when his master came back to the hotel at night, and was in attendance again in the morning, with hot water, to assist at his master’s toilet. Dick sent him on further errands from day to day, and upon one occasion came squarely up to him—inadvertently of course—while Grandison was engaged in conversation with a young white man in clerical garb. When Gran- dison saw Dick approaching, he edged away from the preacher and hastened to- ward his master, with a very evident expression of relief upon his countenance.

“Mars Dick,” he said, “dese yer abolitioners is jes’ pesterin’ de life out er me tryin’ ter git me ter run away. I don’ pay no ’tention ter ’em, but dey riles me so sometimes dat I’m feared I’ll hit some of ’em some er dese days, an’ dat mought git me inter trouble. I ain’ said nuffin’ ter you ’bout it, Mars Dick, fer I did n’ wan- ter ’sturb yo’ min’; but I don’ like it, suh; no, suh, I don’! Is we gwine back home ’fo’ long, Mars Dick?”

“We’ll be going back soon enough,” replied Dick somewhat shortly, while he inwardly cursed the stupidity of a slave who could be free and would not, and registered a secret vow that if he were unable to get rid of Grandison without as- sassinating him, and were therefore compelled to take him back to Kentucky, he would see that Grandison got a taste of an article of slavery that would make him regret his wasted opportunities. Meanwhile he determined to tempt his servant yet more strongly.

“Grandison,” he said next morning, “I’m going away for a day or two, but I shall leave you here. I shall lock up a hundred dollars in this drawer and give you the key. If you need any of it, use it and enjoy yourself,—spend it all if you like,— for this is probably the last chance you’ll have for some time to be in a free State, and you’d better enjoy your liberty while you may.”

When he came back a couple of days later and found the faithful Grandison at his post, and the hundred dollars intact, Dick felt seriously annoyed. His vexa- tion was increased by the fact that he could not express his feelings adequately. He did not even scold Grandison; how could he, indeed, find fault with one who so sensibly recognized his true place in the economy of civilization, and kept it with such touching fidelity?

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“I can’t say a thing to him,” groaned Dick. “He deserves a leather medal, made out of his own hide tanned. I reckon I’ll write to father and let him know what a model servant he has given me.”

He wrote his father a letter which made the colonel swell with pride and plea- sure. “I really think,” the colonel observed to one of his friends, “that Dick ought to have the nigger interviewed by the Boston papers, so that they may see how contented and happy our darkeys really are.”

Dick also wrote a long letter to Charity Lomax, in which he said, among many other things, that if she knew how hard he was working, and under what difficul- ties, to accomplish something serious for her sake, she would no longer keep him in suspense, but overwhelm him with love and admiration.

Having thus exhausted without result the more obvious methods of getting rid of Grandison, and diplomacy having also proved a failure, Dick was forced to con- sider more radical measures. Of course he might run away himself, and abandon Grandison, but this would be merely to leave him in the United States, where he was still a slave, and where, with his notions of loyalty, he would speedily be re- claimed. It was necessary, in order to accomplish the purpose of his trip to the North, to leave Grandison permanently in Canada, where he would be legally free.

“I might extend my trip to Canada,” he reflected, “but that would be too pal- pable. I have it! I’ll visit Niagara Falls on the way home, and lose him on the Canada side. When he once realizes that he is actually free, I’ll warrant that he’ll stay.”

So the next day saw them westward bound, and in due course of time, by the somewhat slow conveyances of the period, they found themselves at Niagara. Dick walked and drove about the Falls for several days, taking Grandison along with him on most occasions. One morning they stood on the Canadian side, watching the wild whirl of the waters below them.

“Grandison,” said Dick, raising his voice above the roar of the cataract, “do you know where you are now?”

“I’s wid you, Mars Dick; dat’s all I keers.” “You are now in Canada, Grandison, where your people go when they run

away from their masters. If you wished, Grandison, you might walk away from me this very minute, and I could not lay my hand upon you to take you back.”

Grandison looked around uneasily. “Let’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick. I’s feared I’ll lose you ovuh heah,

an’ den I won’ hab no marster, an’ won’t nebber be able to git back home no mo’.” Discouraged, but not yet hopeless, Dick said, a few minutes later,— “Grandison, I’m going up the road a bit, to the inn over yonder. You stay here

until I return. I’ll not be gone a great while.” Grandison’s eyes opened wide and he looked somewhat fearful. “Is dey any er dem dadblasted abolitioners roun’ heah, Mars Dick?” “I don’t imagine that there are,” replied his master, hoping there might be.

“But I’m not afraid of your running away, Grandison. I only wish I were,” he added to himself.

Dick walked leisurely down the road to where the whitewashed inn, built of stone, with true British solidity, loomed up through the trees by the roadside. Ar- rived there he ordered a glass of ale and a sandwich, and took a seat at a table by a window, from which he could see Grandison in the distance. For a while he hoped that the seed he had sown might have fallen on fertile ground, and that

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Grandison, relieved from the restraining power of a master’s eye, and finding him- self in a free country, might get up and walk away; but the hope was vain, for Grandison remained faithfully at his post, awaiting his master’s return. He had seated himself on a broad flat stone, and, turning his eyes away from the grand and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay close at hand, was looking anxiously toward the inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed fidelity.

By and by a girl came into the room to serve his order, and Dick very natu- rally glanced at her; and as she was young and pretty and remained in attendance, it was some minutes before he looked for Grandison. When he did so his faithful servant had disappeared.

To pay his reckoning and go away without the change was a matter quickly accomplished. Retracing his footsteps toward the Falls, he saw, to his great dis- gust, as he approached the spot where he had left Grandison, the familiar form of his servant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open, sleep- ing the time away, oblivious alike to the grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment.

“Grandison,” soliloquized his master, as he stood gazing down at his ebony encumbrance, “I do not deserve to be an American citizen; I ought not to have the advantages I possess over you; and I certainly am not worthy of Charity Lomax, if I am not smart enough to get rid of you. I have an idea! You shall yet be free, and I will be the instrument of your deliverance. Sleep on, faithful and affectionate servitor, and dream of the blue grass and the bright skies of old Kentucky, for it is only in your dreams that you will ever see them again!”

Dick retraced his footsteps towards the inn. The young woman chanced to look out of the window and saw the handsome young gentleman she had waited on a few minutes before, standing in the road a short distance away, apparently engaged in earnest conversation with a colored man employed as hostler for the inn. She thought she saw something pass from the white man to the other, but at that moment her duties called her away from the window, and when she looked out again the young gentleman had disappeared, and the hostler, with two other young men of the neighborhood, one white and one colored, were walking rapidly towards the Falls.

Dick made the journey homeward alone, and as rapidly as the conveyances of the day would permit. As he drew near home his conduct in going back without Gran- dison took on a more serious aspect than it had borne at any previous time, and although he had prepared the colonel by a letter sent several days ahead, there was still the prospect of a bad quarter of an hour with him; not, indeed, that his father would upbraid him, but he was likely to make searching inquiries. And notwithstanding the vein of quiet recklessness that had carried Dick through his preposterous scheme, he was a very poor liar, having rarely had occasion or incli- nation to tell anything but the truth. Any reluctance to meet his father was more than offset, however, by a stronger force drawing him homeward, for Charity Lomax must long since have returned from her visit to her aunt in Tennessee.

Dick got off easier than he had expected. He told a straight story, and a truth- ful one, so far as it went.

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The colonel raged at first, but rage soon subsided into anger, and anger mod- erated into annoyance, and annoyance into a sort of garrulous sense of injury. The colonel thought he had been hardly used; he had trusted this negro, and he had broken faith. Yet, after all, he did not blame Grandison so much as he did the abo- litionists, who were undoubtedly at the bottom of it.

As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her, privately of course, that he had run his father’s man, Grandison, off to Canada, and left him there.

“Oh, Dick,” she had said with shuddering alarm, “what have you done? If they knew it they’d send you to the penitentiary, like they did that Yankee.”

“But they don’t know it,” he had replied seriously; adding, with an injured tone, “you don’t seem to appreciate my heroism like you did that of the Yankee; perhaps it’s because I was n’t caught and sent to the penitentiary. I thought you wanted me to do it.”

“Why, Dick Owens!” she exclaimed. “You know I never dreamed of any such outrageous proceeding.

“But I presume I’ll have to marry you,” she concluded, after some insistence on Dick’s part, “if only to take care of you. You are too reckless for anything; and a man who goes chasing all over the North, being entertained by New York and Boston society and having negroes to throw away, needs some one to look after him.”

“It’s a most remarkable thing,” replied Dick fervently, “that your views corre- spond exactly with my profoundest convictions. It proves beyond question that we were made for one another.”

They were married three weeks later. As each of them had just returned from a journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.

A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza of the colonel’s house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro from the yard ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the colonel’s buggy to enter. The colonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged and travel-stained, bowed with weariness, and upon his face a haggard look that told of hardship and privation, sat the lost Grandison.

The colonel alighted at the steps. “Take the lines, Tom,” he said to the man who had opened the gate, “and

drive round to the barn. Help Grandison down,—poor devil, he’s so stiff he can hardly move!—and get a tub of water and wash him and rub him down, and feed him, and give him a big drink of whiskey, and then let him come round and see his young master and his new mistress.”

The colonel’s face wore an expression compounded of joy and indignation,— joy at the restoration of a valuable piece of property; indignation for reasons he proceeded to state.

“It’s astounding, the depths of depravity the human heart is capable of! I was coming along the road three miles away, when I heard some one call me from the roadside. I pulled up the mare, and who should come out of the woods but Gran- dison. The poor nigger could hardly crawl along, with the help of a broken limb. I was never more astonished in my life. You could have knocked me down with a feather. He seemed pretty far gone,—he could hardly talk above a whisper,—and I had to give him a mouthful of whiskey to brace him up so he could tell his story. It’s just as I thought from the beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of run-

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ning away; he knew when he was well off, and where his friends were. All the per- suasions of abolition liars and runaway niggers did not move him. But the desper- ation of those fanatics knew no bounds; their guilty consciences gave them no rest. They got the notion somehow that Grandison belonged to a nigger-catcher, and had been brought North as a spy to help capture ungrateful runaway ser- vants. They actually kidnaped him—just think of it!—and gagged him and bound him and threw him rudely into a wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut, and fed him on bread and water for three weeks. One of the scoundrels wanted to kill him, and persuaded the others that it ought to be done; but they got to quarreling about how they should do it, and before they had their minds made up Grandison escaped, and, keeping his back steadily to the North Star, made his way, after suffering incredible hardships, back to the old plantation, back to his master, his friends, and his home. Why, it’s as good as one of Scott’s novels! Mr. Simms2 or some other one of our Southern authors ought to write it up.”

“Don’t you think, sir,” suggested Dick, who had calmly smoked his cigar throughout the colonel’s animated recital, “that that kidnaping yarn sounds a lit- tle improbable? Is n’t there some more likely explanation?”

“Nonsense, Dick; it’s the gospel truth! Those infernal abolitionists are capa- ble of anything—everything! Just think of their locking the poor, faithful nigger up, beating him, kicking him, depriving him of his liberty, keeping him on bread and water for three long, lonesome weeks, and he all the time pining for the old plantation!”

There were almost tears in the colonel’s eyes at the picture of Grandison’s suf- ferings that he conjured up. Dick still professed to be slightly skeptical, and met Charity’s severely questioning eye with bland unconsciousness.

The colonel killed the fatted calf for Grandison, and for two or three weeks the returned wanderer’s life was a slave’s dream of pleasure. His fame spread throughout the county, and the colonel gave him a permanent place among the house servants, where he could always have him conveniently at hand to relate his adventures to admiring visitors.

About three weeks after Grandison’s return the colonel’s faith in sable hu- manity was rudely shaken, and its foundations almost broken up. He came near losing his belief in the fidelity of the negro to his master,—the servile virtue most highly prized and most sedulously cultivated by the colonel and his kind. One Monday morning Grandison was missing. And not only Grandison, but his wife, Betty the maid; his mother, aunt Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom and John, and his little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation; and a hurried search and inquiry in the neighborhood resulted in no information as to their whereabouts. So much valuable property could not be lost without an effort to recover it, and the wholesale nature of the transaction carried consternation to the hearts of those whose ledgers were chiefly bound in black. Extremely energetic measures were taken by the colonel and his friends. The fugitives were traced, and followed from point to point, on their northward run through Ohio. Several times the hunters were close upon their heels, but the magnitude of the escaping party

2. William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870).

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begot unusual vigilance on the part of those who sympathized with the fugitives, and strangely enough, the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train. Once, twice, the colonel thought he had them, but they slipped through his fingers.

One last glimpse he caught of his vanishing property, as he stood, accompa- nied by a United States marshal, on a wharf at a port on the south shore of Lake Erie. On the stern of a small steamboat which was receding rapidly from the wharf, with her nose pointing toward Canada, there stood a group of familiar dark faces, and the look they cast backward was not one of longing for the flesh- pots of Egypt. The colonel saw Grandison point him out to one of the crew of the vessel, who waved his hand derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook his fist impotently—and the incident was closed.

1899

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