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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 71, September, 1863

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 71, September, 1863

Author: Various


        
Release date: October 5, 2004 [eBook #13631]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 12, NO. 71, SEPTEMBER, 1863 ***

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

       *       *       *       *       *

VOL. XII.--SEPTEMBER, 1863.--NO. LXXI.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE PURITAN MINISTER.


It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen
hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest
settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness
recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an
ever remoter distance,--not yet so far but that a stout wooden gate at
each end of the village street indicates that there is something outside
which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness
which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the
smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these
abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock
yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the
consummation of the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In
which settlement of the Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to
pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, the warning drum is
beating its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem
village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag
is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without
money and beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham
Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour, a service
for which Abraham, each year, receives a half-pound of pork from every
family in town.

Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to
this important building, the centre of the village, the one public
edifice,--meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in
one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a
half-mile from it. And yet the people ride to meeting, short though the
distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her
husband;--and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine
of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern
ones, young gentlemen.

We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is
the pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a
terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house
is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their
horses, provided it be not done too near the passage-way. For at that
opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted
black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears
also a heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the
ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his
bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin
cartridge-boxes.

The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself,
the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat
roof and battlements,"--a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel
down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned
pounds, and carefully expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside
with clay, and finished with clay-boards, larger than our clapboards,
outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet square, with a chimney half
the width of the building, and projecting four feet above the thatched
roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on
each of the two sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with
oiled paper only, part glazed in numerous small panes. And between the
windows, on the outside, hang the heads of all the wolves that have been
killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers think that the
wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's clothing.

The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four
vergers bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who
have just arrived from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and
left to stay quietly in the Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines,
and the liberty of a private walk in the garden. The sexton has just
called for the minister, as is his duty twice every Sunday, and,
removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black
skull-cap, and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better
handling of his manuscript. He looks round upon his congregation, a few
hundred, recently _seated_ anew for the year, arranged according to rank
and age. There are the old men in the pews beneath the pulpit. There are
the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with ruffs, showy belts,
gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots. There
are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs,"
"embroidered or needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut
works,"--a mystery,--"slash apparel,"--another mystery,--"immoderate
great vayles, long wings," etc.,--mystery on mystery, but all recorded
in the statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate.
There are the wives of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the
grammar-school master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the
mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still
too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also;
for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday
meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and
gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements
of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the shrinking form of some
humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the principal aisle,
bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to the
garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.

Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets
in! "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one
writer, triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be
short," which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no
authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one
thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will
sometimes pray an hour each,--one with confession, one with private
petitions, a third with petitions for church and kingdom, and a fourth
with thanksgiving,--neither part of the quartette being for an instant
confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
hour-glass, may say,--but that he will not anticipate the levity to be
born in a later century with Mather Byles,--"Now, my hearers, we will
take another glass."

In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe
to any one who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the
statute, "If any one interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of
worship, they shall be reproved by the magistrate, and on repetition
shall pay £5, or stand two hours on a block four feet high, with this
inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone, but the
law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It
is but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely
whipped for declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H----'s
preaching,--since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes
for declaring that Mr. H---- preached lies, and that his instruction was
the doctrine of devils,--since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was
sentenced to pay five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same
Mr. H---- sent abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and
lambs. Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.

But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
undoubtedly the larger share.

The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose
sleepy eyes have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand
of the constables,--the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is
kept for the smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,--look up thoroughly
awakened now. Bright eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for
a little interlude is coming. Many things may happen in this pause after
the sermon. Questions may be asked of the elders now, which the elders
may answer,--if they can. Some lay brother may "exercise" on a text of
Scripture,--rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns out. Candidates
for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be the
proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The
last town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage
may be published. Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending
magistrate may be required to stand upon a bench, in his worst garments,
with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes, and acknowledge his sins
before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.

These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is
time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely
offer." Then the people in the galleries come down and march two
abreast, "up one ile and down the other," passing before the desk, where
in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of these holds a
moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and
good-will. Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other
valuables, such as "a fair gilt cup, with a cover," for the
communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some
one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten
tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the
words, "Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and
then the benediction.

And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the
aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom
stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses,
each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance,
and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.

Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two
centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing
prove wearisome in the delineation now. It needed all this accumulation
of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England
church-going have changed since those early days. But what must have
been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious
and painful preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old
Watertown graveyard;--"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He
relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding
his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on
Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.
He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned
as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when
he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly
had three sermons a day,--one after every meal. He was "an universal
scholar and a walking library,"--he studied twelve hours a day, and
said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went
to sleep.

A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous
life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have
survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the
Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at
thirty,--especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge
to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr.
Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture,
"wherein he largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most
entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis."

For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to
have for each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable
duty for each. He must visit families during several afternoons in every
week, sending previous notice, so that children and domestics might be
ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for counsel" in his own
home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of conscience,
ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring
towns, a kind of religious dissipation which increased so fast that the
Legislature at last interfered to restrict it. He must have five or six
separate seasons for private prayer daily, devoting each day in the week
to special meditations and intercessions,--as Monday to his family,
Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to other
societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He
must have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and
whole nights prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself
starved," unless he fasted once a month at farthest, while he often did
it twice in a week. Then there were public fasts quite frequently,
"because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought, grasshoppers,
caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the
neighborhood, and the minister must expound it as "symbolizing the
conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor people," the latter being the
mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military expedition, the minister
might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a muster, he
must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
officiate instead.

One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on
weddings and funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make
a usage seem ancestral, or to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now
remembers that our progenitors for more than a century disused religious
services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates alone could perform
the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the monopoly
quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin
at Geneva, by John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the
Westminster Assembly, and by the French Huguenots. The bell might ring,
the friends might walk, two and two, to the grave; but there must be no
prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions of the English and
Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said King
James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear
shoes and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit
of eating salt fish on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that
Roman Catholics eat it on Friday.

But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were
sermons. Mr. John Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral
sermon in immortal verse:--

  "On Sabbath day he went his way,
      As he was used to do,
  God's house unto, that they might know
      What he had for to show;

  God's holy will he must fulfil,
      For it was his desire
  For to declare a sermon rare
      Concerning Madam Fryer."

The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
another.

The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
by theological controversy.

In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
block among its branches now.

One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational
provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and
retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a
day. Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger
Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no
such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But
the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to
death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after the age of
sixteen;--not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with
murder,--though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and
the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service,
at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in
Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel"
punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a
ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running
water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced
with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in 1649, was
sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes
offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to
the elders." And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young
female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the
County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology
for the word "courting."

An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the
ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and
powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave
Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil
authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty,
they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally
referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him
in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated,
and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard,
was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his
head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and
one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and
one said that they had _prayed_ the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it
seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they came
out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought
in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,"
in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which
certainly gives a singular impression of the style of gospel prevailing
inside the meeting-house that day. But it is good to know, on the other
side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared
an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become afterwards
convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the
order from being rescinded.

These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives
without relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have
little to joy in in this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think
so, to read the dismal diaries, printed or manuscript, of those days. "I
can compare with any man living for fears," said Hooker. "I have sinned
myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay
down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the
suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who
drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of
white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the
Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to
the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge," in 1644? Did the famous
Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew cosmology, upon
the waters,--strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians who
would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is
startling to remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public
funeral, that "some person be appointed to look after the burning of the
wine and the heating of the cider," and to hear that on this occasion
there were thirty-two gallons of wine and still more of cider, with one
hundred and four pounds of that ensnaring accessory, sugar. Francis
Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave
convincing proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the
very relaxations of the Puritan minister were more spiritual than
spirituous, and to send forth a good Nineteenthly from his own lips was
more relishing than to have the best Double X go in.

In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only
Elders for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days.
The commonalty bore the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of
Roger William's offences was his wishing to limit these terms to those
who gave some signs of deserving them. The name "Mr." was allowed to
those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and also to
professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of
vessels, and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs."
Mr. Josiah Plastow, when he had stolen four baskets of corn from the
Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah. "Mr." seems to have meant
simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir" merely, a title
given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to the
time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the
idolatry of saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes
designated as Sir Paul, Sir Peter, and Sir James.

In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is
humiliating to find that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin.
The highest compensation I can find recorded is that of John Higginson
in 1671, who had £160 voted him "in country produce," which he was glad,
however, to exchange for £120 in solid cash. Solid cash included
beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and musket-balls, value one
farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had £60, and Mr.
Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in money and
half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap
in New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather
says, most salaries were less than £100, which he thinks "might account
for the scanty harvests enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton
both tell the story of a town where "two very eminent ministers were
only allowed £30 per annum" and "the God who will not be mocked made
them lose £300 worth of cattle that year." The latter also complains
that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the
stars, would shine without earthly contributions.

He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words,
"Synecdotical Pay,"--in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a
part is used for the whole. And apparently various causes might produce
this Synecdoche. For I have seen an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the
Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young ministers have often
occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of the
wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
own sins.

However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
the minister's grounds in order.

Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I
have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
prayer to wean him at last.

He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart
and "Thine forever."

Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
should find rest there.

Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
in New England might be walking to execution with their male
companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.

It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat
of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.

Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.

Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the
majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as
these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and
grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal
but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou
whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion!
thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth!
thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine
epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton
Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even
Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and
Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be
tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so
comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major
Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.

There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the
Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends
wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his
marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying
into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break
from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou
shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the
resolution, the Puritan historian says, _so far_ as going into the
Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the
ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.

With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the
astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It
must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or
peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval
laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."

John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
vindication of their strong measures.

It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When
Goody E---- testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a
witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was
still lame from it,--when her daughter testified that she rode on the
same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,--when the
grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another
stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,--when W. B----, aged
forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem
Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried
round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the
minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and
"then all would be well,"--when one woman summoned her three children
and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that
she was a witch and so were they all,--what could be done for such
prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty?
It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the
convictions.

One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
us,--though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not
yet unfolded,--was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it.
Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and
labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of
their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand
fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent
sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed
discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears
start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"--or worse yet,
"Parson, your sermon is too long,"--or most embarrassing of all,
"There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit."
But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
stern discipline in such cases made and provided.

But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female
tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the
unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders,
naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous
ribbons,"--these were the things which tried men's souls in those days,
and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel"
seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one
slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited
from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and
"immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty,
part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each
and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another
for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a
silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds,
escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged
with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was
fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.

The question of veils seems to have rocked the Massachusetts Colony to
its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th,
1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils,
regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural
degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural
extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such
cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr.
Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his
chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a
custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting
without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding
visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.

Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what
was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done
much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with
something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the
time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair
like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
made into periwigs;--and by some women wearing borders of hair, and
their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does
this hint at puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially
among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,--"divers of the
elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in
this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy,
was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they
usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the
tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused
communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought
they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous
Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them
resemble the Locusts that came out of y'e Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,
8,--and as an eminent Divine calls them, _Horrid Bushes of Vanity_; such
strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord
to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."

Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a
community where every man was expected to have a current supply of
religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain
hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much
trouble; and E.F.,--for they mostly appear by initials,--who, coming to
New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken
for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane,
and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh,"
Cotton Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally
stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher,--less
innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one
bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath
appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,--though,
indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship
among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who
knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly
asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in
one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied
his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--"Sam the
Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them. Finally, "this eminent
worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his
parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting
this among other fire at them:--'I see, no longer pipe, no longer
dance,'--so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had
never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly
neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and
Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been
the worst penalty the man suffered.

It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan
ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and
have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the
regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a
sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent
heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say
one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept
Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to
crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened
to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some
village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists;
thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that
extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by
her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and
converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who
proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and
hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the
ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and
chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that
the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these,
and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans,--who
claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is
the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to
be at anchor?

Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with
the leadership of the New-England colonies,--Cotton, Hooker, Norton,
Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an
obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the
"Magnalia":--Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than
snow";--Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an
eagle";--Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
children might pluck";--Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a
very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family
and he taught his family as if it had been his church";--Warham, the
first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt
respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
hour.

These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?

These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,"
and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"--"I
know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently
added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once
reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a
passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts all
one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man,
finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to
apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.

What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness
and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their
shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since
supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he
was "a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in
his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
do, and not African tribes alone.

There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan
ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and
musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the
heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their
grape-shot:--"My fathers and brethren," said John Higginson, "this is
never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation
of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as
are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over
since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end
and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man
among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a
man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet
of a sincere Christian."

       *       *       *       *       *

THOREAU'S FLUTE.


  We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
    His pipe hands mute beside the river;--
    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
  But Music's airy voice is fled.
  Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
    The bluebird chants a requiem;
    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
  The Genius of the wood is lost."

  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
    There came a low, harmonious breath:
    "For such as he there is no death;--
  His life the eternal life commands;
  Above man's aims his nature rose:
    The wisdom of a just content
    Made one small spot a continent,
  And tuned to poetry Life's prose.

  "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
    Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
    To him grew human or divine,--
  Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
  Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
    And yearly on the coverlid
    'Neath which her darling lieth hid
  Will write his name in violets.

  "To him no vain regrets belong,
    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
    Gave to the world no poor lament,
  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
  O lonely friend! he still will be
    A potent presence, though unseen,--
    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
  Seek not for him,--he is with thee."

       *       *       *       *       *

MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.


The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of
acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their
nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque.
Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from
the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a smile
rather than a sigh.

Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it
became necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon
S----.

Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had
lingered about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many
sweet memories of Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in
the neighborhood of Gramley Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels,
and the plenty of a country tea-table,--not averse to strawberry
short-cake, or the snowy delights of cottage-cheese.

It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful
welcome, a bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled
me with curiosity and amazement.

  "Was it a man?
  A devil infernal?
  An angel supernal?"

Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and,
as I cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in
the singular form,--stooping, squatting, and groping before me.

The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics
upon the ground,--smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy,
too silent to be mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at
nightfall with a maniac, and I was not sorry when my nearer approach
resolved these strange phenomena into a well-dressed pedestrian on
all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.

He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride
his handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly
bewildered. I looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay
shining at me from the very spot where he had been so industriously
peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him, fitted his treasure
into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle said,--

"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"

"Yes."

"So do I."

We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,--I
too tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again;
but when, at last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's
door-step, he turned suddenly to me and asked,--

"Are you fond of the country?"

"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.

"Ah, you are an artist!"

"I hope to be one."

"Its a bad business," said he, testily,--"a very bad business. If I were
you, I would give it up."

"Have you ever tried it?"

"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,--"yes, and
everything else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I
would give you the benefit of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and
make a good story of it to your wife."

"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."

"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true
artist, who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite
relations, who penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the
silent sanctuaries of the mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man.
He must be a happy man,--happy in a sweet and natural way. A man whose
life is passed in a daily delight that gently stirs without feverish
excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He _ought_ to
marry."

"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.

"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
commencing,--

  'O thou earthly sea,
  Every person thinks of thee,--
  The sailor, and the busy bee,
  And the Chinese drinking tea!'

I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they
seemed good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they
struck others."

He smiled pleasantly.

"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding
your history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with
your experience."

"Take warning, then, if need be.

"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of
a ready writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a
young miss of her first conquest.

"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just
rising into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my
condescension. It was a charity, indeed, to give my support to this
fledgling, and I sent to it a long article, entitled, 'The Cultivated,
as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts were returned, with
this quiet bit of advice:--'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other
reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from
having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I
determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to
despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of
the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent
periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for
publication.

"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now
Mrs. Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings
in ten melancholy stanzas, beginning,--

  'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'

These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'

"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the
plot of which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left
to my hero, who forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but,
fearful lest the beloved object should worship his money more than his
merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor
to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her
acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and,
in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science,
and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into
the surf, where both are drowned.

"This, you see, was quite new."

"Quite," I replied, laughing.

"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive
the first remittance for this truly original work.

"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable
'Märchen,' and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's
Legacies,' a series of children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of
poetry, pleasantry, and information. I sent them to 'The Juvenile
Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted with a profusion
of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.

"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a
small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He
seemed the personification of _nonchalance_, impudence, and conceit. As
I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a
woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on
my mentioning my name, he rose and extended a very dirty hand.

"'Glad to see you, Sir,--hope you'll continue your contributions,--Uncle
Job,--good idea, Sir,--love the little ones? So do we, Sir,--work very
hard for them,--don't pay at all,--poor business,--pure charity,--that's
all.'

"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are
expected to work from charity?'

"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,--more
contributions than we can use,--best authors in the country write for
us,--pure love for the little ones, I assure you.'

"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to
bestow my time and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer
them to others who do.'

"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he
growled. 'We don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most
of the articles ourselves.'

"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end
to the interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.

"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'

"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than
the first, emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'

"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall
take measures that you will not at all relish. If you will not _give_ me
my manuscripts, I shall _take_ them'; and, suiting the action to the
word, I snatched them from a shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and
carried them off without further parley.

"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet
spirit within me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote
a sentimental tale, full of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft
epithets. It was accepted by a well-known monthly, then supposed to be
in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of comfort, and I
looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and renown,
when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my
story, and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the
magazine had been sold to pay her debts.

"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it
to 'The Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it
was published, praised, and further contributions requested. Several
weeks passed away. I indited a poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or,
Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in print, and my thirst for
fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note reached me from
'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to pay
me in _back numbers of the magazine_. I wrote no more."

"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"

"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist,
and was thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I
took for my motto; and, hiring a small studio in ---- Street, I bought a
large canvas, on which I sketched out a picture which cost me much
money, more time, and many anxious thoughts.

"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a
marriage was being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people,
in anomalous costumes, was gathered round a youth supposed to be a
rejected and despairing lover, who had fallen on the ground in a swoon.
It was very affecting, I thought.--it would be very effective. Were
_she_ to see it, she would be stung with remorse,--she would behold the
probable effects of her present indifference,--she would relent.

"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it
was a complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio,
draping before a cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing
for my men, until the last touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was
all ready for the Spring Exhibition. Then came doubts and speculations.
Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all? Would Ellen like it? How
would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to look at it?
Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?

"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name
sent my picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it,
by some strange chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington.
The juxtaposition gave me a new idea. I saw at once what a villanous
daub mine was, and went away oppressed with shame and a new-found
modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the Exhibition, in
the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
coming out.

"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I _must_
turn back, and show you the _funniest_ picture! So theatrical! So
distorted!'

"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'

"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are
such a good critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art
you ever saw?'

"Can you imagine my feelings?"

"I think I can."

"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken
studio, previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully
packing my materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and
an elderly, shrewd-looking man walked into the room.

"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.

"'I am a friend of his.'

"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number ----?'

"'Yes.'

"'How much does he ask for it?'

"'How much are you willing to give?'

"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'

"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'

"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio.
Twenty-five dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture?
I looked at the card:--

    'PARKER J. SPERRY,
    '_Yankee Pie Depot_,
    '126 ---- Street.'"

"Did you ever paint again?"

"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in
a gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning,
when she was out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the
wall. I turned it round. Directly across the mouth was pasted a white
label, on which I saw neatly printed in India-ink,--'Queen of the
Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in my library as a
lesson to me for all future time.

"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard
my experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing
business, and make a handsome income for my wife and two children.
To-morrow I go to New York, to bring them into these wilds for change of
air. And now, good night."

       *       *       *       *       *

ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.

FLORESTAN'S STORY.


I.

In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are
sacred persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you,
staining the pane through which their light shone with their own images,
but who became perfectly transparent to the word they uttered, the song
they sang, or the work they did. Such a sacred person to me is the
gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's Albums. Many years
ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in the
half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had
been awaiting its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was
a listener, and, hastily brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a
far corner of the room, away from his _répertoire_. She confessed, that,
afterward, when he was not present, she had looked on that which he
evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in pencil, upon it,
"Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but no
"Sternenkranz" was found,--the word was evidently her master's own
fancy; so she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto
complained of her indifference to the pieces he set before her, and
informed him that she should perish at his feet, unless he would give
her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr Otto, in
a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to
which he had given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to
each soul that could receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower
of Lilies to another. It was the same as with that white stone which the
Seer of Patmos saw,--within it "a name written which no man knoweth,
saving he that receiveth it."

This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was
known among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day,
next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert
Schumann's works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not
as universal, it is just as fervent. Many silent and holy hours have I
sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their
Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of
romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his
sorrow, and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to
know of him,--of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I
came to know, in the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to
relate.

A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to
accommodate a certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold
winds from over the Lakes made me wish that the Modern Athens had kept
its lecture-system at home; for it has always seemed to me, that,
wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it. Such ugly
thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from
the face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed
out of me by the glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which
animated the coziest of rooms. Why has not some poet celebrated the
experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of the thawee responds
to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release until
all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from
the Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet
nothing-at-all thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to
life.

Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into
the room, soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls.
Confused, I started up; and it was some moments before I understood that
the music proceeded from the room adjoining mine in the hotel. Not
altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess of whom I have spoken
had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was appointed to
stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"

As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave.
Whether the musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a
terrible termination was in the music, I knew not: the latter was quite
probable, for, alas! such fearful Icarus-falls are not rare in poor
Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long, but, rising quickly,
passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next room.

"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.

Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was
so swart that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once
imagined that a stream of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from
some more Oriental race. I stammered out an apology for my intrusion,
but told him how irresistible were such subtile threads as Schumann's
"Carnival" had projected through the walls which separated our rooms.

"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."

Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which,
having for bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the
ice-dragon coiled about him, is suddenly filled with the warm spread of
the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he said,--

"In me, wanderer that I am,--in me, with the _Heimweh_ in my heart never
to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,--you see
Florestan."

"Louis Boehner!"

Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little
piece of paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand.
On it these words were written:--


     "_Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never
     want for such a friend as thou hast been to_

     ROBERT SCHUMANN."

I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when,
at this moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a
living halo.

Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before
them the fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention
some facts connected with Schumann's "Carnival, or _Scènes Mignonnes_,
on Four Notes." Not by any means representing the pure depths of
Schumann's soul, this strange medley is yet pregnant with historic
associations. The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing
twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a
town of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts
frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there
interesting to his sensitive soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must
be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or
_es_ for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" was begun and
for ten years edited by Schumann,--in what spirit we may gather from his
own words:--"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very
encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
Hünten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since
Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star
was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole,
Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One
day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,--Let us not
idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art
shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of
music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at
which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the _Philistines_,
which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc.,
for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.
"Young Germany" was making itself felt in all coördinate directions:
forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,--a sharp and
spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and
Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality
brought together in Kühne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who
talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz
Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the
friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was
the _Davidsbund_, or League of David (the last of the "Scènes Mignonnes"
is named "Marche des _Davidsbündler_ contre les Philistines"). An
agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a fine
sketch of this company, which we will quote.

"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle
age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty
remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians
around him, who all listened to his observations with profound
attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and
suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly
promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain
consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl
of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole
world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her
native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of
twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg,
he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and
was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be
melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote
himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been
obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as
uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for
the career of a _virtuoso_, and was pursuing the study of the piano with
an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career
forever. He did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate
for him in the end, by directing him to his true vocation, composition.
Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of love, in the garb of admiration
for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and
dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric
Louis Boehner,[A] who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession,
but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the
indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,--now, in his capacity
of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just
returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true
secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master
is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and
industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as many more
young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."[B]

[Footnote A: The "Florestan" of the "Scènes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is
Clara herself; "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.]

[Footnote B: See Dwight's _Journal of Music_, Vol. VIII. No. 3.]

Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood
that sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of
so many future sorrows and glories.

"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys
together at Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day,
which since has blessed hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone;
this breast held his sorrows and his hopes, when he was struggling to
reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his madness he cast
himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
eyelids when they were closed in death."

Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.

At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out,
and was informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had
been waiting nearly fifteen minutes!


II.

Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room,
listening to that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And
first he told me the story of Schumann's love.

The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously
than judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have
survived the tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no
childhood: at the piano she was kept through all the bright days, roving
only from scale to scale, when she should have been roving from flower
to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she entered into
her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which
were mosses beneath them. From this training she came before the best
audience in Germany, and stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen
summers, and by acclamation was crowned the Queen of the Piano. Franz
Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and many years afterward
wrote in his extravagant way,--"When we heard Clara Wieck in Vienna,
fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks
and lifted by delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets."
At her performance of Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was
inspired to write the following verses:--

  "A weird magician, weary of the world,
  In sullen humor locked his charms all up
  Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
  And threw the key into the sea, and died.
  The manikins here tried with all their might;
  In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
  His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
  A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
  Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
  Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
  She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
  And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
  Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
  The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
  The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
  All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
  To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
  Who with white fingers guides them in her play."

The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child
was the young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first
appearance, he wrote,--"Others make poetry,--she is a poem." And soon
afterward,--"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
up,--the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."

From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young
composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one
caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask,
"Whither?" he poured out before this child the half-revealed hopes
striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her ingenuous and
earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
due time they were to be rather _clenched_, through pain. It was under
this baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first
sonata,--"Florestan and Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all
from whom fame was graceful.

In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those
wonderful little "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without
it their meaning is as strange as their names. Often did he say,--"I can
write only where my life is in unison with my works." "Listen now to
these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and struck the piano;
"these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with song, "My
peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged
aspirant released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But
faster than planets through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased,
and there was a long silence; and then he told the unspeakable portion
of his story by performing these two: "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has
ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed the pathos of the
latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath that
crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts
with the terrible questioning, _Wherefore?_

Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each
other, the shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was
coming to pass. He had educated this girl to be an artist to bring _him_
fame; alas, it must be confessed that he thought also of certain
prospective thalers. Willing as he was that all Leipsic should admire
his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the "Zeitschrift." He
then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who, when
he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally
the poor soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst
have known that it is Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!

The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all
acquaintance, forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating
at once Clara's career as a _virtuoso_, he took her to Vienna.

No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess
of Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up
to Beethoven. Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the
"Schwärmibriefe of Eusebius to Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the
general reader of the "Zeitschrift," who, doubtless, fancied that its
editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.

"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out
an angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou
not with us? (_Warum!_) And how thou wilt have thought of us last
night, from the 'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major
symphony! I also thought of thee then, Chiara, pure one, bright one,
whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither thy longing draws thee,
but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."

At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's
"Myrthen," whose dedication, _Seiner geliebten Braut_, breaks forth in
the passionate and beautiful song,--"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"

But this word _Braut_ means Bride in the German sense of "affianced";
and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the
breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his
glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of
Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two
passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of bitter Marahs.
"But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the right
to know, from these,"--his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."

Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces
when they ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.


III.

But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to
have revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I
sought Boehner, and asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded
to the one subject that bound us together, I requested him to tell me,
what had not yet been given to the world, the details of Schumann's
insanity and death.

Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:--

"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings
so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in
extremes, was as if you gave an Æolian harp to be swept now by a cold
north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines
of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled. Under
his grief he seemed stronger; but when his joy came, when Clara was his
own, and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices
within, which, to him, had been unutterable,--then we saw that the
emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
devastating torrent.

"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or
six years before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times
he imagined himself again cruelly separated from the patient and tender
being who never left his side; and he would write pieces full of
distractions, in the midst of each of which, however, some touchingly
beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through seething
seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a
wearing persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice
aside gently, saying,--'A long life is before me; but it must be lived
in a few years.' And, indeed, the works which have reached farthest into
hearts that loved him most deeply date from these times. I remember,
that, when he sat down to compose his last symphony, he said,--'It is
almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion needs another chamber.'

"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word:
'Hasten.' I left all my affairs, and came to watch for many months
beside this beloved one. It was not a wild delirium which had taken
possession of him; the only fit of that kind was that in which he tried
to drown himself in the Rhine,--at the time when the papers got hold of
the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his conviction that
he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
power,--would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest
discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till
night,--during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance.
Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories
of his earlier works.

"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
own:--'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be
understood here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.'
Then, turning to me, he said,--'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my
last prayer for you,'--handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and
now leave us, to come again and kiss me when I am cold.'

"Then I left him alone with his Clara.

"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."

       *       *       *       *       *

Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis
Boehner, and said, as my voice would let me.--"Take this paper, and when
you would have a friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come
and help me to be that friend."

       *       *       *       *       *

THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.


Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is,
Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is,
Will they fight for their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must
be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent
security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the theses of philosophers
or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not
likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have
not industry sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present
development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities
likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from
disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure,
because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like
all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full
recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to
be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world
as we find it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent
to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art,
literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to
glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes.
No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight
to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers
like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may
have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these
fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the
world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like
the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree
with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to
ordinary humanity.

It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise
it, to make a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but
it can do little either in directing or deterring. There is nothing in
the gloomy vaticinations of Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is,
which should be permitted to darken our future. The mediæval antagonisms
of races, when Christianity threw but a partial light over mankind, and
before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests among people of
diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results
of emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they
may be, afford any measure of the progress which opens before our
enfranchised masses. The insular and contracted life of the colonies,
cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism, has no parallel in
the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through the
continent on which our problem is to be solved.

In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report
truthfully upon the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the
name. Civilization, in its career, may often be traced in the
nomenclatures of successive periods. These people were first called
contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were next
introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally
referred to as freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and
they are yet to be lost in the better and more comprehensive designation
of citizens, or, when discrimination is convenient, citizens of African
descent.

The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at
Port Royal has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of
Europe, as well as the best friends of the United States, like Cairnes
and Gasparin, have testified much interest in its progress. An English
periodical of considerable merit noticed at some length "Mr. Pierce's
Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in its
incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in
American affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number,
characterizes the colony as "that small pacific army, far more important
in the history of civilization than all the military expeditions
despatched from time to time since the commencement of the civil war."

       *       *       *       *       *

No little historical interest covers the region to which this account
belongs. Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Florida, involving the rival pretensions of Spain and
France, were made in the first half of the sixteenth century. They were
conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and Soto, in search of
the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was
attempted until 1562.

In that year,--the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and
ten years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the
most illustrious victim,--Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief,
anxious to found beyond the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots,
fitted out the expedition of Jean Ribault, which, after a voyage of over
three months across the ocean and northward along the coast, cast anchor
on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the name which it
retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for another
and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark
and perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John Hawkins
sailed for Africa in quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to
the New World. The expedition of Ribault was the first visit of
Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South Carolina, and the
garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices ever
made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to
detail here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their
abandonment of the post, the terrible voyage homeward, or the
perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose. Nor is it within the
compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins
in 1565 with timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his
sad fate, the ferocity of Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and
the avenging chivalry of Dominic de Gourges. The student is baffled in
attempts to fix localities for the deeds and explorations of this
period, even with the help of the several accounts and the drawings of
Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been
abandoned by the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for
trade or adventure.

Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other
commissioners to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the
country with reference to an emigration thither. Hilton's Narration,
published in London the year after, mentions St. Ellens as one of the
points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including the Sea
Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish
words, and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be
alarmed by it. The commissioners, whose explorations were evidently
prompted by motives of gain, close a somewhat glowing description of the
country by saying, "And we could wish that all they that want a happy
settlement of our English nation were well transported thither."

Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But,
relieved of her civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek
colonial empire on the southern coast of North America. In 1663, Charles
II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk, Shaftsbury,--each famous in
the conflicts of those times,--and to their associates, as proprietors
of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for philosophy than
affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,--an idle work, as it
proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle,
arrived at Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed
probably with apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they
removed to the banks of the Ashley, and, after another change of site,
founded Charleston.

In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port
Royal, but was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent
settlement of the Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until
1700. This district is divided into four parishes, St. Peter's, St.
Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being fifty-eight miles long and
thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St. Helena parish
includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a few
smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district
occupied by our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands
is St. Helena, being fifteen miles long and six or seven broad,
containing fifty plantations and three thousand negroes, and perhaps
more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is two-thirds or
three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and
Coosaw, Morgan, Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort
is the largest town in the district of that name, and the only one at
Port Royal in our possession. Its population, black and white, in time
of peace may have been between two and three thousand. The first lots
were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in 1720. Its
library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about
thirty-five hundred.

The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since
to an island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to
a sound, a parish, and an island, originated probably with the
Spaniards, and was given by them in tribute to Saint Helena, the mother
of Constantine the Great, whose day in the calendar is August 18th.
Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given by Ribault.
Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely
to have been so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord
proprietors, while Carolina was a province of Great Britain.

The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable
Revolutionary romance. In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent
two hundred troops with a howitzer and two field-pieces to Beaufort.
Four companies of militia from Charleston with two field-pieces,
reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and
are said to have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port
Royal Islands.

There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands.
One of these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is
claimed by some antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault.
There are the well-preserved walls of one upon the plantation of John J.
Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles south of Beaufort, now called
Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel Higginson's regiment. It
is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to it as a
Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site
of Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and
other points.

The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of
the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present
a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of
French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points,
affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the
buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy
mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen
bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of
ginned cotton to the acre,--quite different from the plantations in
Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred
pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one
finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks,
furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton peculiar
to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the
action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks
which permeate the land in all directions. The seed of this cotton,
planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser
texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a
like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department secured
eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in
storehouses, when our military occupation began.

The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
lignum-vitæ, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in
diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the
long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,--and the palmetto,
shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by
vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the
summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and
white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil
is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These
interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which the cassena is
the most distinguished variety, and faced with ditches, make the
prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in March
and April with the yellow jessamine, (_jelseminum_,)--the cross-vine
(_bignonia_,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,--the Cherokee rose,
(_loevigata_,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,--and, two
months later, the palmetto royal, (_yucca gloriosa_,) which protects the
fence with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its
pyramid-like clusters of white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs
serve a utilitarian end in art and medicine. The live-oak is famous in
shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto, as it is called,
resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British
fleet; and the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The
moss (_tillandsia usneoides_) served to calk the rude vessel of the
first French colonists, longing for home. It may be used for bedding
after its life has been killed by boiling water, and for the subsistence
of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a powerful
diuretic.

The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and
to the pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described
in Eliot's book. Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to
fishing for devil and drum.

The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first
and second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a
free circulation of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built
under the supervision of a professional architect. Those on the
plantations, designed for the planters or overseers, were, with a few
exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving mechanic in New
England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards are
without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of
orange-trees. One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed,
they are not well enough built to last long. The estates upon Edisto
Island are of a more patrician character, and are occasionally
surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees fancifully
trimmed.

The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although
some may be traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from
the religious persecutions of France.

The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious
periodicals, mainly Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern
life has been elsewhere observed in the progress of our army.
Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal and ruinous was
found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's
collection. Another was Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and
tribute to its distinguished examples, translated by Warden in 1810.
These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to see the infinite
wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the
moral basis of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who
distrusts the rightfulness of his daily conduct, has resolved to persist
in it, and therefore hates most of all the prophet who comes to confront
him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them to mankind.

Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice
without being sought for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out,
still showing the place where it was worn by the rope which bound the
sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own quarters were was a woman
who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of maternity as to
crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the
unwilling witness. She declared to her parents and sisters that it was
hell to live in such a place. She was accustomed to advise the negroes
how best to avoid being whipped. When the war began, she assured them
that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to send them
to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds
which marriage and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell
on these painful scenes of the past, constant and authentic as they are;
and they hardly concern the practical question which now presses for a
solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need of injustice or
exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are
fortunate slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides,
there was less labor exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely
managed plantations of the Sea Islands than in other districts where
slave-labor was better and more profitably organized and directed.

The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th,
1861, was followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea
Islands. In the latter part of December, the Secretary of the Treasury,
Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman and humane disposition
naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a special agent to
visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition of
the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of
suggesting some plan for the organization of their labor and the
promotion of their general well-being. The agent, leaving New York
January 13th, 1862, reached that city again on his way to Washington on
the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a large number of
the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their cabins.
The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the
people, their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the
best mode of administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a
report. The plan proposed by him recommended the appointment of
superintendents to act as guides of the negroes and as local
magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the
same agent. The agent presented the subject to several members of
Congress, with whom he had a personal acquaintance, but, though they
listened respectfully, they seemed either to dread the magnitude of the
social question, or to feel that it was not one with which they as
legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself,
and Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone
seemed to grasp it, and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is
doubtful if any member of the Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any
interest in the enterprise, though it has since been fostered by the
Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the President
appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then
said, somewhat impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be
troubled with such details,--that there seemed to be an itching to get
negroes into our lines; to which the agent replied, that these negroes
were within them by the invitation of no one, being domiciled there
before we commenced occupation. The President then wrote and handed to
the agent the following card:--

"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion
give Mr. Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as
may seem judicious.

"A. LINCOLN.

"Feb. 15, 1862."

The President, so history must write it, approached the great question
slowly and reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the
proclamations he was to issue in the September and January following.
Perhaps that slowness and reluctance were well, for thereby it was given
to this people to work out their own salvation, rather than to be saved
by any chief or prophet.

Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no
funds wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission,"
organized in Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief
Association," organized in New York on the 20th of the same month,
gallantly volunteered to pay both superintendents and teachers, and did
so until July 1st, when the Government, having derived a fund from the
sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the Rebels,
undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies,
together with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and
called the "Port Royal Relief Committee," providing for the support of
the teachers.

When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an
enterprise which otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance
had been given as to the legal condition of the negroes. The Secretary,
in a letter to the agent, had said, that, after being received into our
service, they could not, without great injustice, be restored to their
masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private,
that negroes who were within our lines, and had been employed by the
Government, should be protected in their freedom. No official assurance
of this had, however, been given; and its absence disturbed the
societies in their formation. At one meeting of the Boston society
action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people,
when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A
public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken
up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a
regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the
probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do
what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in
the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be
found base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it
should be stated, have been managed by persons of much consideration in
their respective communities, of unostentatious philanthropy, but of
energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one of whom has ever filled
or been a candidate for a political office.

There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be
mentioned. The venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first
year, hearing of the enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of
it. I went to his chamber, where he had been confined to his bed for
many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a patriot who read the
hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not been
given to protect the enterprise,--said that but for his disability he
should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the
postscript of his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty
benediction to the work and to myself. Restored in a measure to
activity, he is still spared to the generation which fondly cherishes
his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
read to his fellow-citizens, gathering close about him and hanging on
his speech, words of counsel and encouragement.

On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of
superintendents and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were
women, left the harbor of New York, on board the United States
steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on the 9th. It was a
voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange, and it
was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store
for us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal
to our responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South
Carolina, they were addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the
little he had learned of their duties, enjoined patience and humanity,
impressed on them the greatness of their work, the results of which were
to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps, one way or the
other, the social problem of the age,--assuring them that never did a
vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when
she conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written
history which should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful
to their trust, there would come to them the highest of all recognitions
ever accorded to angels or to men, in this life or the next,--"Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."

This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed
during the first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its
close they had all reached their appointed posts. They took their
quarters in the deserted houses of the planters. These had all left on
the arrival of our army, only four white men, citizens of South
Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except one,
who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not
interfered with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be
so. The negroes had, in the mean time, been without persons to guide and
care for them, and had been exposed to the careless and conflicting talk
of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were also brought in
connection with some _employés_ of the Government, engaged in the
collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were doing
anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing
the plantations and the negroes upon them as _adscripti gleboe_ looking
forward to their restoration to their masters at the close of the war.
They were uncertain as to the intentions of the Yankees, and were
wondering at the confusion, as they called it. They were beginning to
plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant cotton,
regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except
one at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one
bearing the name of John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr.
Peck. This is not the place to detail the obstacles we met with, one
after another overcome,--the calumnies and even personal violence to
which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early period of our
struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they
deserve, and let others of better natures, who were then blind, but now
see, not be taunted with their inconsiderate acts. The nickname of
Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may, however, be fitly remembered.
It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of Puritan and
Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
disposed to coöperation. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our
most important operations were in the district under the command of
Brigadier-General Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were
not supposed to be favorable to the enterprise, and who, during the
political contest of 1860, had been the chairman of the National
Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and his
sense of the duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government,
that his personal courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He
received his mortal wound at Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of
September following, and a braver and abler officer has not fallen in
the service.

Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other
hindrances occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some
eight thousand acres of esculents,--a fair supply of food,--and some
four thousand five hundred acres of cotton (after a deduction for
over-estimates) were planted. This was done upon one hundred and
eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty people,
of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands,
made up of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual
classification and estimate of the productive capacity of laborers, to
three thousand eight hundred and five and one-half full hands. The
cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand pounds of
ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred
thousand pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod,
resulting from the lateness of the planting, exposed it to the ravages
of the frost and the worm. Troops being ordered North, after the
disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated in the middle
of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished,
were abandoned. In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty
tons of corn-fodder and seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the
ear, for army-forage. These are but some of the adverse influences to
which the agricultural operations were subjected.

It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the
superintendents and teachers commissioned by the associations. There was
as high a purpose and devotion among them as in any colony that ever
went forth to bear the evangel of civilization. Among them were some of
the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard, Yale, and
Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,--men of
practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was
scarce worthy, and to whom, whether they are among the living or the
dead, I delight to pay the tribute of my respect and admiration.

Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at
Boston, April 25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work,
which he was obliged to leave six months before his death. He was a
faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so many months had passed
since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he dwelt
fondly upon them in his last days.

The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St.
Helena Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,--and
though not fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of
a superintendent, yet even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He
was an evangelist, also, and he preached with more unction than any
other the gospel of freedom,--always, however, enforcing the duties of
industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but always buoyant and
trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to
Beaufort,--being assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a
month, and was a remote and exposed point; but he went fearlessly and
without question. The evacuation of Edisto in July, the heat, and the
labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at the village
on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where
were some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive
exertions brought on malarious fever. This produced an unnatural
excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot sun, he rode about to attend to
his people. He died,--men, women, and children, for whom he had toiled,
filling the house with their sobs during his departing hours. His
funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers which they
and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church
of Dorchester. Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth
can live fourscore years in a little more than one score. One high
privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear of the immortal edict of
the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his people was
to be secured for all time to come.

Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he
never advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the
Episcopal Church. He was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the
quality as well as adding to it by self-discipline. He had good
business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences, was humane, yet
not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was
recently asking the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who
first taught them their letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr.
Phillips." He was at home in the autumn for a vacation, was at the
funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time in imperfect
health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate
return necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,--but his health
never came back to him. His quarters were in the same house where
Barnard had died, and in a few days, on the 5th of December, he followed
him. He was tended in his sickness by the negroes, and one day, having
asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the words, "Thank
God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the same
funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North
to bereaved relatives.

Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his
professional studies at the summons of Christian duty. He labored
faithfully as a superintendent, looking after the physical, moral, and
educational interests of his people. He had a difficult post, was
overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of taking as
good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came
home in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the
citizens and students of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill,
and, again coming North, died October 30th, a few days after reaching
New York. The young woman who was betrothed to him, but whom he did not
live to wed, has since his death sought this field of labor; and on my
recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had
guided to freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed
away!

       *       *       *       *       *

On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal
having been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the
charge of the freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus
Saxton, a native of Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the
free air of the valley of the Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane
nature; and under his wise and benevolent care they still remain. The
Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in Florida, are
within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.

The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject
race, more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The
native African was of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and
untamable. The master was obliged to abate something of the usual rigor
in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner, now at Port
Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would
perpetually insist on doing his work in his own way, and being asked the
threatening question, "A'n't you going to mind?" would answer, with
spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master desisted! Severe discipline
drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a mutilation of person
which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816, eight
hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades
of Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the
early part of the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on
farms, and raising cattle. They had two hundred and fifty men fit to
bear arms, led by chiefs brave and skilful. The story of the Exiles of
Florida is one of painful interest. The testimony of officers of the
army who served against them is, that they were more dangerous enemies
than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the longest.
The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of
Charleston during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark
Vesey, relates that one of the native Africans, when called to answer to
the charge against him, haughtily responded,--"_I was a prince in my
country, and have as much right to be free as you!_" The Carolinians
were so awe-struck by his defiance that they transported him. Another,
at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade about to speak, and
said, "_Die silent, as I do!_" and the man hushed. The early newspapers
of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned by
these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the
third generation reduced to obedient slaves.

Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood
been carried so far as on these Sea Islands,--a deterioration due to
their isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the
constant surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with
each other, involving a physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature
punishes disobedience to her laws. The population with its natural
increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the soil under existing
modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is found
pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had
been carried so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration,
in January, 1862, was obliged to confess the existence of a general
disinclination to military service on the part of the negroes; though it
is true that even then instances of courage and adventure appeared,
which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to be
developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it
has been. You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a
subject race; but in vain will you attempt to study it until the burden
is lifted. The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while the
bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She soothes us with her
deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing in pain,
is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the
spirit the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not
even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the
capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
transmuted to a man.

       *       *       *       *       *

My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It
was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their
posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen,
and to note the progress they had made. There were interesting scenes to
fill the days. I saw an aged negro, Cæsar by name, not less than one
hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.
The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,--a free savage in the
wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long
years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the
President,--his life covering an historic century. A faithful and
industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival,
rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of
pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don Carlos,
whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon
Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last
hours,--now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a
slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the
daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston. He talked
intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and
accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion
of their preparatory studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C.
Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private
tutor.

Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,--an old woman, with much
power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had
formerly been. The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If
you're as long beating Secesh everywhere as you have been in taking the
town, guess it'll take you some time!" Indeed, the negroes had somewhat
less confidence in our power than at first, on account of our not having
followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The same quaint
old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"

I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of
Trescot, formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom
Russell describes in his "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when
Russell saw it. Its large library is deposited in the Smithsonian
Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the first and second
stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families of
negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see
a cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the
plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name,
linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.

The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are
usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees,
perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred
graves, marked only by sticks eighteen inches or two feet high and about
as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones in a negro graveyard
at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather illiterate
inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and
that was in a burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the
head of the grave, shaped something like an ordinary gravestone, about
three feet high and six inches wide. The inscription was as follows:--

  OLd Jiw
  de PArt his
  Life on the
  2 of WAY
  Re st frow
  LAuer

On the foot-board were these words:--

  We ll
  d OW N.

The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also
write a little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He
said that he used to carry his father in his arms in his old age,--that
the old man had no pain, and, as the son expressed it, "sunk in years."
I inquired of Kit concerning several of the graves; and I found, by his
intelligent answers, that their tenants were disposed in families and
were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing,
are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a
faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned
with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.

There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African
origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as
evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can
cure. They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a
sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking,
until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and
they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby
be brought on.

But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing
directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most
consideration.

And, first, as to _education_. There are more than thirty schools in the
territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are
commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association. They have an
average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less
frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range in
the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their
letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being
taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to, which had
been going on for a few weeks. Very many did not have the opportunity
for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the spring and
summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times
some of the teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a
brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home,
leaving the schools to be broken up. It was not until October or
November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and
they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is as
yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds
wherewith to provide one.

I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.
There were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the
town of Beaufort,--ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of
sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the
plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in
some cases but two or three, and in others none.

The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages
in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader,
Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had
enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or
learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on
an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness
for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
had not abated.

On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on
St. Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with
the long, pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading
branches, and surrounded by the gravestones of the former proprietors,
which bear the ever-recurring names of Fripp and Chaplin. This school
was opened in September last, but many of the pupils had received some
instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were present on
my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened
at noon and closed at three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the
children to work in the field or perform other service in which they
could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page 70th in
Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before,
and they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had
recited the first thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the
multiplication-table as high as fives, and were commencing the sixes. A
few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come latest to the
school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring
prompting at the beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much
spirit hymns which had been taught them by the teachers, as,--

  "My country, 'tis of thee,
  Sweet land of liberty";

also,--

  "Sound the loud timbrel";

also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the
closing stanzas of which are,--

  "The very oaks are greener clad,
    The waters brighter smile;
  Oh, never shone a day so glad
    On sweet St. Helen's Isle!

  "For none in all the world before
    Were ever glad as we,--
  We're free on Carolina's shore,
    We're all at home and free!"

Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the
highest beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service
than to write the songs of praise for these little children, chattels no
longer, whom the Saviour, were he now to walk on earth, would bless as
his own.

The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by
the way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white
soldiers, particularly when the singers roll out,--

  "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"

The children also sang their own songs, as,--

  "In de morning' when I rise,
    Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?[A]
  In de mornin' when I rise,
    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?

  "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
  I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?

  "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
  Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?

  "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.

[Footnote A: How d' y' do?]

Also,--

  "I would not let you go, my Lord,
    I would not let you go,
  I would not let you go, my Lord,
    I would not let you go.

  "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
    Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
  Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
      I can't stay behin'.

  "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
    I can't stay behin',
  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
    I can't stay behin'.

  "De angels march all roun' de trone,
  De angels march all roun' de trone,
  De angels march all roun' de trone,
      I can't stay behin'.

  "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
    I can't stay behin',
  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
    I can't stay behin'.

  "Dere's room enough," etc.

Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down
in the lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my
home." Russell's "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard
them in his evening row over Broad River, on his way to Trescot's
estate.

One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from
Philadelphia. Another is from Newport, Rhode Island, where she had
prepared herself for this work by benevolent labors in teaching poor
children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of olive
complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of
gentle address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with
an overwrought consciousness of her race. She had read the best books,
and naturally and gracefully enriched her conversation with them. She
had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had been a pupil in the
Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that city,
then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had
received only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their
parents,--and let this be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She
had refused a residence in Europe, where a better social life and less
unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she would not dissever
herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a superficial
sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
elevation.

At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a
young woman from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of
parents passed into the skies," whose lives have both been written for
the edification of the Christian world. She teaches two schools, at
different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars in each.
One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on
a review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being
questioned as to the subjects of the lessons, they answered
intelligently. They recited the twos of the multiplication-table,
explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard, and wrote
letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining
district, a graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian
clergyman of Providence, Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which
a class of three pupils was about finishing Ellsworth's First
Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had just finished
Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two
schools. He exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence
to be repeated with different tones and inflections, and one could not
but remark the excellent imitations.

In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto
refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were
engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had
picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave. One
class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St.
John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They stumbled a little
on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they got
along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July,
1862, Ned, who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus,
a man of seventy, who also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty
children into two schools, and taught them as best they could for five
months until teachers were provided by the societies. Ned has since
received a donation from one of the societies, and is now regularly
employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this
school for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to
bed. She had become interested in learning by hearing her younger sister
read when she came home from school; and when she asked to be taught,
she had learned from this sister the alphabet and some words of one
syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are, however, learning.

On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a
small church on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from
Kingston, Massachusetts. She had manifested much persistence in going to
this field, went with the first delegation, and still keeps the school
which she opened in March, 1862. She taught the pupils their letters.
Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of ten pupils
read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read
so rapidly that she had to be checked,--the only case of such fast
reading that I found. She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners
to a corner of the room and exercising them upon an alphabet card,
requiring them to give the names of letters taken out of their regular
order, and with the letters making words, which they were expected to
repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states,
lakes, and large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the
different continents on the map of the world, as they were called. I saw
the teacher of this school at her residence, late in the afternoon,
giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and girls, all but two
being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the Book
of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St.
John. Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly
at the teacher, and whispered,--"he's putting me in the book"; and as
Elsie guessed, so I do. The teacher was instructing her pupils in some
dates and facts which have had much to do with our history. The
questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were these:--

"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"

"Virginia."

"When?"

"1620."

"Who brought them?"

"Dutchmen."

"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"

"Pilgrims."

"Did they bring slaves?"

"No."

A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given
in a loud tone by the whole school:--

"What country do you live in?"

"United States."

"What State?"

"South Carolina."

"What island?"

"Port Royal."

"What town?"

"Beaufort."

"Who is your Governor?"

"General Saxton."

"Who is your President?"

"Abraham Lincoln."

"What has he done for you?"

"He's freed us."

There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited,
each having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and
each provided with two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But
it is unnecessary to describe them, as they were very much like the
others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an industrial school, which meets
two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with
some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I
visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others
with aprons, pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.

Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations
to address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the
pupils with questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I
have rarely heard children answer with more readiness and spirit. We had
a dialogue substantially as follows:--

"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"

"Going to work, Sir."

"On what?"

"Cotton and corn, Sir."

"What are you going to do with the corn?"

"Eat it."

"What are you going to do with the cotton?"

"Sell it."

"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"

One boy answered in advance of the rest,--

"Put it in my pocket, Sir."

"That won't do. What's better than that?"

"Buy clothes, Sir."

"What else will you buy?"

"Shoes, Sir."

"What else are you going to do with your money?"

There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,--

"What are you going to do Sundays?"

"Going to meeting."

"What are you going to do there?"

"Going to sing."

"What else?"

"Hear the parson."

"Who's going to pay him?"

One boy said,--"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,--

"We's pays him."

"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people
do, and you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with
them?"

There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,--

"Send 'em to school, Sir."

"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"

"We's pays him."

One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any
natural incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years
the ideas and habits of good citizens.

The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved,
except that it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking.
They are joyous, and you can see the boys after school playing the
soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory is very susceptible in
them,--too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the reasoning faculty.

The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the
parents being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and
cultivating their crops, and it not being thought best to allow the
teaching to interfere in any way with industrious habits.

A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading,
have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially
detracts from their usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have
already been mentioned. The latter, a man of earnest piety, has died
since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on Hilton Head Island last
summer and autumn, being paid at first by the superintendents, and
afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he enlisted in the
negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were
brought to St. Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to
the school at the Baptist Church, saying to the teachers there that she
could carry them no farther. They could read their letters and words of
one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on Wadmelaw Island, a
kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only citizen
of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South
Carolina, stood up boldly for his official and personal protection.
Hettie had been taught to read by his daughter; and let this be
remembered to the honor of the young woman.

Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The
most advanced classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can
read simple stories and the plainer passages of Scripture; and they
could even pursue self-instruction, if the schools were to be suspended.
The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated. They could
read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and
adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not
bounded north by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and
east by the sea, with dim visions of New York on this planet or some
other,--about their conception of geography when we found them. They are
acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of
life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their schools;
remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a
letter, and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their
race; then contemplate what is now transpiring, and you have a scene
which prophets and sages would have delighted to witness. It will be
difficult to find equal progress in an equal period since the morning
rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I have
never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel
Angelo has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor
souls struggling in darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the
upper and better light transcends in moral grandeur anything that has
ever come from mortal hands.

       *       *       *       *       *

Next as to _industry_. The laborers, during their first year under the
new system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of
wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same
thing. The notion that they were to raise no more cotton has passed
away, since work upon it is found to be remunerative, and connected with
the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were at first
particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of
their masters, the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and
ginned the cotton on the promise of wages. Except upon plantations in
the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more immediately
remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the
only penalty for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for
the tenement and land adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not
exceeding two dollars per month. Both the Government and private
individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land by the
recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which
may, by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by
noon; and the same was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on
very many of the plantations. As I was riding through one of Mr.
Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty persons at work who
belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the first
delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent
contributions for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the
tax-sales, and combining a fine humanity with honest sagacity and close
calculation, no man is so well fitted to try the experiment. He bought
thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and cultivated eight
hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and ninety-nine
and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,--a larger
increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due
mainly to prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal
Wand said to me,--"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the
negroes to take land for cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton
Head Island said, that on that island the negroes had, besides adequate
corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four acres of cotton to a
hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it, except near
the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had
charge of the refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena
village, and who had cleared and fenced patches for gardens, felling the
trees for that purpose.

The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might
do; but they do about as much as he himself would do, after a residence
of a few years in the same climate, and when he had ceased to work under
the influence of Northern habits. Northern men have sometimes been
unjust to the South, when comparing the results of labor in the
different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing
latitude. There has been less complaint this year than last of "a pain
in the small of the back," or of "a fever in the head,"--in other words,
less _shamming_. The work has been greatly deranged by the draft, some
features of which have not been very skilfully arranged, and by the
fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the military
authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by
the women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that
field-work does not become women in the new condition; and so it may
seem to some persons of just sympathies who have not yet learned that no
honest work is dishonorable in man or woman. But this matter may be left
to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation, may not be consistent
with the finest feminine culture or the most complete womanliness; but
it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country
of Europe; and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this
generation, when the American negroes become the peers of the Swiss
peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than without it, when she is not
yet fitted for the needle or the book.

The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply
capital to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my
faithful guide and attendant, who had done for me more service than any
white man could render," with funds of his own, and some borrowed money,
bought at the recent tax-sales a small farm of three hundred and
thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was to plant
sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one
and a half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my
last day in the territory, and one-third of his crop was then in.
Besides some servant's duty to an officer, for which he is well paid, he
does the work of a full hand on his place. He hires one woman and two
men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters hand. He has
two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he
said, "She's the best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with
her hoe as I know her to be with her tongue, Harry's estimate must be
right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and blind in both eyes, whom
he guides with a rope,--carrying on farming, I thought, somewhat under
difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor.
He has promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an
account of the progress of his crop. He has had much charge of
Government property, and when Captain Hooper, of General Saxton's staff,
was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany him; but at
last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
all two to leave together."

Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The
Government is building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen
feet by fourteen, with two rooms, each provided with a swinging
board-window, and the roof projecting a little as a protection from
rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have fifty
cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the
direction of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a
month. Rarely have I talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was
my great regret that I had not time to visit the village of improved
houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of
his last days.

       *       *       *       *       *

Next as to the _development of manhood_. This has been shown, in the
first place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not
appear upon our first introduction to these people, and they did not
seem to understand us when we used to tell them that we wanted them to
own land. But it is now an active desire. At the recent tax-sales, six
out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them, comprising two
thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one hundred
and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United
States. One of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The
other five were made by the negroes on the plantations combining the
funds they had saved from the sale of their pigs, chickens, and eggs,
and from the payments made to them for work,--they then dividing off the
tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit, before
mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands,
who are equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are
cultivating sixty-three acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes,
with as many more to be planted, four and a half of cow-peas, three of
pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These facts are most significant.
The instinct for land--to have one spot on earth where a man may stand,
and whence no human being can of right drive him--is one of the most
conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any
fair degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.

This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness
of rights, and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed
by white men. The former slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a
resident of New York when the war broke out, have generally left the
plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying that they will not be his
bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if they remain
on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to
Coosaw Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken
belonging to a negro. The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from
the corporal, to whom the soldier had handed it, thinking that the
negroes would not take it from an officer. They then carried it to the
superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was given
for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but
these are sufficient.

Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the
comforts and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society,
for the purpose of maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St.
Helena Island, which is under the charge of Friend Hunn, of the good
fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in Delaware three thousand
dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he now harbors
and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of
the world's people. In this store alone--and there are others on the
island, carried on by private enterprise--two thousand dollars' worth of
goods are sold monthly. To be sure, a rather large proportion of these
consists of molasses and sugar, "sweetening," as the negroes call it,
being in great demand, and four barrels of molasses having been sold the
day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for plates, knives,
forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,--in
short, the distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform
allowance,--are very generally rejected. But there is no article of
household-furniture or wearing apparel, used by persons of moderate
means among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the
opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South would
open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops
astir. Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the
various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few
coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters.
Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The indisposition
to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed
and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future,
the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children, and the
convictions of duty. These all exist in the negro, in a state of greater
or less development. To give one or two examples. One man brought
Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
obtained from selling pigs and chickens,--thus providing for the future.
Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same
officer, intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred
dollars, to be transmitted by him to their wives, and this besides what
they had sent home in other ways,--showing the family-feeling to be
active and strong in them. They have also the social and religious
inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of Hilton Head,
they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the
Government longer to provide them. The result was a contribution of two
dollars and forty-eight cents. They had just fled from their masters,
and had received only a small pittance of wages, and this little sum was
not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the treasury. Another
collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena Island,
upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses
of worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,--not a bad collection for
some of our Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are
said to be lowest, and sad indeed are some features of their lot, yet
with all earnestness and confidence I enter my protest against the
wicked satire of Carlyle.

Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste
which has troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer
be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of
them as freemen. Your Irishman, who now works as a day-laborer, honestly
thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have
no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or
to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our
prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system,
readily accommodate themselves to our interests, even without much aid
from the moral sentiments.

Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public
trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive
in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must
be addressed. All the elements of human nature must be appealed to,
physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious. Imperfect indeed
is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers wages, but does
not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars or
thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to
bind both parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.

There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them,
and truth requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good
deal of petty pilfering among them, although they are faithful to
trusts. This is the natural growth of the old system, and is quite
likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present
disturbed and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the
rigid virtues. But inferences from this must not be pressed too far.
When I was a private soldier in Virginia, as one of a three-months'
regiment, we used to bide from each other our little comforts and
delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom
to the conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And
what inferences might not one draw, discreditable to all traders and
manufacturers, from the universal adulteration of articles of food!
These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood in order to get
rations and small benefits,--a natural vice which comes with slavery,
and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed,
hypocritical, but satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and
indulgence in emotion,--psychological manifestations which one may find
in more advanced communities. They show no special gratitude to us for
liberating them from bonds. Nor do they ordinarily display much
exhilaration over their new condition,--being quite unlike the Italian
revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the forum, and
personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their
excitement when an attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while
the assault on Charleston was going on, and in their desire to get their
friends and relatives away from the Rebels,--an appreciation of freedom,
if not ostentatious, at least sensible.

But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races
to self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and
conceited, Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of
one other nation are sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these
therefore be slaves? And where is that model race which shall sway them
all? A people may have grave defects, but it may not therefore be
rightfully disabled.

       *       *       *       *       *

During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different
occasions, to note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment,
known as the First Regiment of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General
Hunter's first regiment was mainly made up of conscripts, drafted May
12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months afterwards, there
being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going home
to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On
the 10th of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent
authority to raise five thousand colored troops, began to recruit a
regiment. His authority from the War Department bore date August 25th,
and the order conferring it states the object to be "to guard the
plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise
a negro regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words
in the instructions of Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the
original expedition went to Port Royal, authorizing him to organize the
negroes into companies and squads for such services as they might be
fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for military service.
Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to General
Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General
Saxton, numbered four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson
took command of it on the 1st of December; and on the 19th of January,
1863, it had increased to eight hundred and forty-nine. It has made
three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,--one before Colonel Higginson
assumed the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the women of
England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in
January up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which
it occupied for a few days until an evacuation was ordered from
head-quarters. The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty
to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies.
Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white
regiments in skirmishing. In _morale_ they seemed very much like white
men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent
soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal, like Robert Sutton, whom
Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of the whole
expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said,
addressing a meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights,
thinking of the war and of his people,--that, when he heard of the
regiment being formed, he felt that his time to act had come, and that
it was his duty to enlist,--that he did not fight for his rations and
pay, but for wife, children, and people.

These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily
depressed, and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have
been reluctant to engage in military service,--their imagination
investing it with the terrors of instant and certain death. But this
reluctance has passed away with participation in active service, with
the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the latent
manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was
of the first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,--a truthful man,
and not given to rose-colored views,--"I did not have faith in arming
negroes, when I visited the North last autumn, but I have now. They will
be not mere machines, but real tigers, when aroused; and I should not
wish to face them." One amusing incident may be mentioned. A man
deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in the
district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes,
became excited with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a
furlough on his return, went to the plantation where he had hid, and
said he would not take five thousand dollars for his place.

But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the
change of feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a
change due in part to the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the
President's Proclamation of January 1st, which has done much to clear
the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines, but more than all to
the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the
6th of April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty
on Port Royal Island,--the first active duty it had performed on the Sea
Islands,--and was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a
march of ten miles, it reached the advanced picket-station, there were
about two hundred soldiers of the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting
orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a careless tone, to one of the
Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's regiment as it
stood in line,--

"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"

"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as
I have to fight for them."

A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting
him as their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a
soldier,--

"What do you think of that regiment?"

The answer was,--

"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot the Rebels than have the Rebels
shoot me"; and none of the by-standers dissented.

As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station
at the Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the
Pennsylvania soldiers, just formed into line preparatory to marching to
Beaufort. The countenances of the latter, which I watched, exhibited no
expression of disgust, dislike, or disapprobation, only of curiosity.
Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the hominy left from the
morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command of the
relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid
desired. This was, it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways
than one in which to perform even an official duty. I rode back to
Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a captain of the First
Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said "he
wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our
fighting." He pronounced the word as spelled with two _g_s; but I prefer
to retain the good English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled
regiment, most of whom were conscripts, said that on his return from
Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men ashore in charge of some
prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them approach from
the wharf, one said,--

"What are those coming?"

"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the
answer.

"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.

But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was
inquired.

"Why, some Secesh prisoners."

"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then
the response from all.

So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had
demonstrated their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember
that such an unreasonable and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time
existed; but it is never worth while to suppress the truth of history.
This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free States; and one
of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston, on
the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the
Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of
negro soldiers which the Free States have sent to the war. On the day
previous, May 27th, a far different scene transpired on the banks of the
Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months before in
Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and
one with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge
on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass,
the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks
and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and
duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and
leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves and their
race.

I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson.
Devoting himself heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties,
and bearing his oppressive responsibility as the leader of a regiment in
which to a great extent are now involved the fortunes of a race, he adds
another honorable name to the true chivalry of our time.

       *       *       *       *       *

Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again
among the familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that
Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the
Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly
pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished
women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two
good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing
the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with
implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had furnished.
Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war,
had been for a brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to
one whom they remembered as the first to point them to freedom and cheer
them with its prospect could hardly be received without emotion. But
there is no time to linger over these scenes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in
doubt, is no longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a
consummation. The negroes will work for a living. They will fight for
their freedom. They are adapted to civil society. As a people, they are
not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity, nor from the vices
which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said to
take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it
may not be possible in a single generation to restore the pristine
manhood. One who expects to find in emancipated slaves perfect men and
women, or to realize in them some fair dream of an ideal race, will meet
disappointment; but there is nothing in their nature or condition to
daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to cheer and
fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly
fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and
aspirations; and these qualities, when stirred and sustained by the
incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the
currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a
benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them a
constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the
calamity of another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity
of being again their oppressors.

       *       *       *       *       *

NO AND YES.


  I watched her at her spinning;
  And this was my beginning
  Of wooing and of winning.

  But when a maid opposes,
  And throws away your roses,
  You say the case forecloses.

  Yet sorry wit one uses,
  Who loves and thinks he loses
  Because a maid refuses.

  For by her once denying
  She only means complying
  Upon a second trying.

  When first I said, in pleading,
  "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
  She heard me half unheeding.

  When afterward I told her,
  And blamed her growing colder,--
  She dropped upon my shoulder.

  Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
  Her very look dispelled it,
  I caught her hand, and held it.

  Along the lane I led her,
  And while her cheeks grew redder,
  I sued outright to wed her.

  Good end from bad beginning!
  My wooing came to winning,--
  And still I watch her spinning.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE MATHER SAFE.


The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
----College in New England procured me access to the library belonging
to that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had
previously enjoyed the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning
for money to buy books for interment in this choice literary catacomb;
nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction of an annual stare at them
through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the effect that
nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more
to the select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the
shelves, could really use the library, I demanded this favor of the
gentleman who desired to recompense me for what I had done for him. The
Librarian, who valued books as things capable of being locked up in
cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion of
rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my
credentials. The authority, however, was not to be questioned;--I was to
be admitted to the library at any hour of the day; and I took care to
drop a civil expression to imply my estimation of the privilege and my
purpose of enjoying it.

Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a
course of reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon
Saturday afternoons, and finally to establish myself, with whatever
authors I had selected, in a certain retired alcove devoted to the
metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind Crawford's bust
of the late President T----, and is nearly opposite the famous Mather
Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
of ---- College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
word of the history of the spacious and ancient coffer to which
allusion is made.

The Mather Safe--which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily
bound with that metal--is said to have been among the possessions of the
author of the "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral
descendant of the Mathers, an eccentric character, popularly known as
Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor, and had the reputation of being
enormously rich, the College authorities of his day were accustomed to
treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I believe,
as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic
blandishments may have had upon their object cannot at present be
determined. For when the day came for the long-expected will to be
opened, it was found that the old gentleman had bequeathed to the
College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let into the
wood-work in one corner of the same,--which papers were not to be
removed or opened for a hundred years.

It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with
the best grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for
considerable expense necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in
the library. Yet, not satisfied with this culpable negligence, Mr.
Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the acceptance of his gift.
He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather Safe, of which
he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could
have access to its contents except in the presence of the other.
Moreover, he required that the Safe should be used only as a receptacle
for packages which the depositors desired to keep from the world for at
least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would have
endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers
left in the Safe,--these being considered instruments whereby immense
possessions would finally come to the College. But, as their worthy
friend, however niggardly in other respects, had taken care to save
nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of disregarding his
wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so, many
years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the
conditions already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so
many persons appeared to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular
legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had been consigned to various
periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women. These were
numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living
person, perhaps to the future occupant of some professor's chair or
metropolitan pulpit.

It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite
alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight
thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I
would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by
this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was
said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the
world. There were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church
and State, which their perpetrators lacked the courag

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