This table, with its alluring figures, that seem to glean gratefully after the steps of labor, is the negro's manifesto of the French slave-trade. The surprising totals betray the sudden development of that iniquity under the stimulus of national ambition. The slave expresses his misery in the ciphers of luxury. The single article of sugar, which lent a new nourishment to the daily food of every country, sweetened the child's pap, the invalid's posset, and the drinks of rich and poor, yielded its property to medicine, made the nauseous palatable, grew white and frosted in curious confections, and by simply coming into use stimulated the trades and inventions of a world, was the slave's insinuation of the bitterness of his condition. Out of the eaten came forth meat, and out of the bitter sweetness.
In 1701, Western San Domingo had 19,000 negroes: in 1777, a moderate estimate gives 300,000, not including 50,000 children under fourteen years of age,—and in the other French colonial possessions 500,000. In the year 1785, sixty-five slavers brought to San Domingo 21,662 negroes, who were sold for 43,236,216 livres; and 32,990 were landed in the smaller French islands. In 1786, the value of the negroes imported was estimated at 65,891,395 livres, and the average price of a negro at that time was 1997 livres.
But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes. A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken from the coast of Africa. The estimate was five per cent, to cover the unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and the mortality was irregular. It was sometimes frightful; a long calm was one long agony: asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide, and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native fields. The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims, who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense, could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make avarice obedient to common sense. It was a transaction incapable of being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with this robbery of life.
Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of slavers.
Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground. When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's margin, where the shark took up the trail.
The census of the slaves in San Domingo was annually taken upon the capitation-tax which each planter had to pay; thus the children, and negroes above forty-five years of age, escaped counting. But in 1789, Schoelcher says that the census declared five hundred thousand slaves; that is, in twelve years the increase had been two hundred thousand. How many negroes deported from Africa do these figures represent! what number who died soon after landing, too feeble and diseased to become acclimated!
Here is the prospectus of an expedition to the coast of Guinea in 1782 for the purpose of landing seven hundred slaves in the Antilles. They were shipped in two vessels, one of six hundred tons, the other a small corvette.
Outfit of large vessel, 150,000 livres" " corvette, 50,000 "Purchase of 700 negroes at 300 livres per head, 210,000 "Insurance upon the passage at 15 per cent., 61,500 "" " " premiums at 15 per cent., 9,225 "————-Total cost of the passage, 480,725 "
The passage was a very prosperous one: only 35negroes spoiled, or 5 per cent, of the wholenumber. The remaining 665 were sold in SanDomingo at an average price of 2,000 livres,making 1,330,000 "Deduct commissions of ships' officers andcorrespondents in West Indies, at 11-1/2 per cent 152,950 "————-1,177,050 "Deduct expenses in West Indies, 17,050 "————-1,160,000 "Deduct exchange, freight, and insurance uponreturn passage of the vessels, 20 per cent., 232,000 "————-928,000 "Deduct crews' wages for 10 months, reckoning thelength of the voyage at 13 months, 55,000 "————-873,000 "Add value of returned vessels, 90,000 "————-963,000 "Deduct original cost of the whole, 480,725 "————-The profit remains, 100 per cent., 482,275 "
Two hundred and seventy-four slavers entered the ports of San Domingo, from 1767 to 1774, bringing 79,000 negroes. One-third of these perished from various causes, including the cold of the mountains and the unhealthiness of the coffee-plantations, so that only 52,667 remained. These could not naturally increase, for the mortality was nearly double the number of births, and the negroes had few children during the first years after their arrival. Only one birth was reckoned to thirty slaves. There was always a great preponderance of males, because they could bear the miseries of the passage better than the women, and were worth more upon landing. Include also the effects of forced labor, which reduced the average duration of a slave's life to fifteen years, and carried off yearly one-fifteenth of the whole number, and the reason for the slaver's profits and for his unscrupulous activity become clear.
Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work of colonial splendor rose. A few great planters debauched the housekeeping of the whole island. Beneath were debts, distrust, shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.
Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened not his tea. What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr. Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected of slavery?[E] It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater shakes testily from his corroded pen. How far the effluvia of the slave-ship will be wafted, into what strange latitudes of temperance and sturdy independence, even to the privacy of solemn and high-minded thought! A nation can pass through epochs of the black-death, and recover and improve its average health; but does a people ever completely rally from this blackest death of all?
[Footnote E:Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I. pp. 32, 34; No. II. pp. 23, 25, 47; No. III. p. 3. "And you, Quashee, my pumpkin, idle Quashee, I say you must get the Devil sent away from your elbow, my poor dark friend!" We say amen to that, with the reserved privilege of designating the Devil. "Ware that Colonial Sand-bank! Starboard now, the Nigger Question!" Starboard it is!]
The Guinea trader brought to San Domingo in the course of eighty years representatives of almost every tribe upon the west coast of Africa and of its interior for hundreds of miles. Many who were thus brought were known only by the names of their obscure neighborhoods; they mingled their shade of color and of savage custom with the blood of a new Creole nation of slaves. With these unwilling emigrants the vast areas of Africa ran together into the narrow plains at the end of a small island; affinity and difference were alike obedient to the whip of the overseer, whose law was profit, and whose method cruelty, in making this strange people grow.
When a great continent has been thus ransacked to stock a little farm, the qualities which meet are so various, and present such lively contrasts, that the termAfricanloses all its application. From the Mandingo, the Foulah, the Jolof, through the Felatahs, the Eboes, the Mokos, the Feloups, the Coromantines, the Bissagos, all the sullen and degraded tribes of the marshy districts and islands of the Slave Coast, and inland to the Shangallas, who border upon Southwestern Abyssinia, the characters are as distinct as the profiles or the colors. The physical qualities of all these people, their capacity for labor, their religious tendencies and inventive skill, their temperaments and diets, might be constructed into a sliding scale, starting with a Mandingo, or a Foulah such as Ira Aldridge, and running to earth at length in a Papel.
The Mandingoes of the most cultivated type seldom found their way to the West Indies. But if ever slave became noticeable for his temperate and laborious habits, a certain enterprise and self-subsistence, a cleanly, regular, and polished way, perhaps keeping his master's accounts, or those of his own private ventures, in Arabic, and mindful of his future, he was found to be a Mandingo. Their States are on the Senegal; Arabic is not their language, but they are zealous Mohammedans, and have schools in which the children learn the Koran. The men are merchants and agriculturists; they control the trade over a great extent of country, and the religion also, for the Koran is among the wares they carry, and they impose at once the whole form of their social condition. These Northern African nations have been subjected to Arab and Moorish influence, and they make it plain that great movements have taken place in regions which are generally supposed to be sunk in savage quiescence. The Mandingoes, notwithstanding a shade of yellow in the complexion, are still negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood. Their features are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type. Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside. But what a history lies between the Fetichism which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship of one God without image or symbol!
In the administration of justice, some classes of their criminals are sold into slavery, and occasionally a Mandingo would be kidnapped. But there are many Mandingoes who are still pagans, and know nothing of Arabic or commerce, yet who have the excellences of the dominant tribes: these were found in the gangs of the slave-merchant.
So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips: a nonchalant air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor. They have magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early contact with Christians. It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres.
The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the sources of the Rio Grande. The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among them. French writers represent them as being capable of sustained labor; they cultivate carefully the millet, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lentils, and have numerous herds. Their mutton is famous, and their oxen are very fat. The Foulahs are mild and affable, full ofesprit, fond of hunting and music; they shun brandy, and like sweet drinks. It is not difficult to govern them, as they unite good sense to quiet manners, and have an instinct for propriety. Their horror of slavery is so great, that, if one of them is condemned to be sold, all the neighbors club together to pay his forfeit or purchase a ransom; so that few of them were found in the slave-ships, unless seized in the fields, or carried off from the villages by night.
They have mechanics who work in iron and silver, leather and wood; they build good houses, and live in them cleanly and respectable. The Foulahs show, quite as decidedly as the Mandingoes, that great passions and interests have given to these parts of Africa a history and developed stocks of men. When the Foulahs are compared with the wandering Felatahs, from whom they came, who speak the same language and wear the same external characters, it will be seen how Nature has yearned for her children in these unknown regions, and set herself, for their sakes, great stints of work, in that motherly ambition to bring them forward in the world. Yes,—thought the Guinea trader,—these skilful Foulahs are Nature's best gifts to man.
Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point. Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and the extent of his intelligence,—this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to that race; he was a Foulah."[F]
[Footnote F:Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique, Tom. I. Ptie 2, p. 147.]
D'Eichthal develops at great length his theory, that the Foulahs are descended from some Eastern people of strong Malay characters, who found their way to their present site through Madagascar, along the coast, to Cordofan, Darfour, and Haoussa. They are bronzed, or copper-colored, or like polished mahogany,—the red predominating over the black. Their forms are tall and slim, with small hands and feet, thin curved noses, long hair braided into several queues, and an erect profile. Certain negro traits do not exist in them.
Burmeister, who saw Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate. "The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy, in spite of his beard, was completely negro-like."[G]
[Footnote G:The Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the AfricanNegro, by Hermann Burmeister.]
But if Ira Aldridge's exaggerated style of acting points to an African origin, would it not be better, if some of our distinguished actors, who are presumptively white before the foot-lights, took out free-papers at once? We have seen Macbeth and Othello so "created" by the Caucasian models of the stage, that but one line of Shakspeare remained in our memory, and narrowly escaped the lips,—"Out, hyperbolical fiend!"
It is not unlikely that the Felatah was mixed with Moorish or Kabylic blood to make the Foulah. If so, it proves the important fact, that, when the good qualities of the negro are crossed with a more advanced race, the product will be marked with intelligence, mobility, spiritual traits, and an organizing capacity. Felatah blood has mixed with white blood in the Antilles; the Jolof and the Eboe have yielded primitive affections and excellences to a new mulatto breed. This great question of the civilizable qualities of a race cannot be decided by quoting famous isolated cases belonging to pure breeds, but only by observing and comparing the average quality of the pure or mixed.
When we approach the Slave Coast itself, strong contrasts in appearance and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes, but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre called Whidah, in North latitude 6°, with Dahomey just behind it, is populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and less than thirty of interior; its people are as industrious and thrifty as any on the face of the earth. They never raised sugar and indigo with enthusiasm, but at home their activity would have interpreted to Mr. Carlyle a soul above pumpkins. They cultivated every square foot of ground up to the threshold of their dwellings; the sides of ditches, hedges, and inclosures were planted with melons and vegetables, and the roads between the villages shrank to foot-paths in the effort to save land for planting. On the day when a crop was harvested, another was sown.
Their little State was divided into twenty-six provinces or counties, ruled by hereditary lords. The King was simply the most important one of these. Here were institutions which would have deserved the epithetpatriarchal, save for the absence of overseers and the auction-block. The men worked in the field, the women spun at home. Two markets were held every four days in two convenient places, which were frequented by five or six thousand traders. Every article for sale had its appropriate place, and the traffic was conducted without tumult or fraud. A judge and four inspectors went up and down to hear and settle grievances. The women had their stalls, at which they sold articles of their own manufacture from cotton or wood, plates, wooden cups, red and blue paper, salt, cardamom-seeds, palm-oil, and calabashes.
How did it happen that such a thrifty little kingdom learned the shiftlessness of slave-trading? Early navigators discovered that they had one passion, that of gaming. This was sedulously cultivated by the French and Portuguese who had colonies at stake. A Whidah man, after losing all his money and merchandise, would play for his wife and children, and finally for himself. A slave-trader was always ready to purchase him and his interesting family from the successful gamester, who, in turn, often took passage in the same vessel. In this way Whidah learned to procure slaves for itself, who could be gambled away more conveniently: the markets exposed for sale monthly one thousand human beings, taken from the inferior tribes of the coast. The whole administration of justice of these superior tribes was overthrown by the advent of the European, who taught them to punish theft, adultery, and other crimes by putting up the criminal for sale.
The Whidah people were Fetich-worshippers; so were the inhabitants of Benin. But the latter had the singularity of refusing to sell a criminal, adjudged to slavery, to the foreign slave-traders, unless it was a woman. They procured, however, a great many slaves from the interior for the Portuguese and French. The Benin people dealt in magic and the ordeal; they believed in apparitions, and filled up their cabins with idols to such an extent as nearly to eject the family.
The slaves of the river Calabar and the Gaboon were drawn from very inferior races, who lived in a state of mutual warfare for the purpose of furnishing each other to the trader. They kidnapped men in the interior, and their expeditions sometimes went so far that the exhausted victims occasioned the slaver a loss of sixty per cent, upon his voyage. The toughest of these people were the Eboes; the most degraded were the Papels and Bissagos.
The Congo negro was more intelligent than these; he understood something of agriculture and the keeping of cattle. He made Tombo wine and some kinds of native cloth. The women worked in the fields with their children slung to their backs. The Congo temperament near the coast was mild and even, like the climate; but there dwelt in the mountains the Auziko and N'teka, who were cannibals. The Congoes in Cuba had the reputation of being stupid, sensual, and brutal; but these African names have always been applied without much discrimination.
The slavers collected great varieties of negroes along the coasts of Loango and Benguela; some of them were tall, well-made, and vigorous, others were stunted and incapable. They were all pagans, accustomed to Fetich- and serpent-worship, very superstitious, without manliness and dignity, stupid and unimpressible.
The Benguela women learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.—But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over which the lilies of France drooped with immunity.
All these negroes differed much in their sensitiveness to the condition of slavery. Many of them suffered silently, and soon disappeared, killed by labor and homesickness. Others committed suicide, in the belief that their spirits would return to the native scenes. It was not uncommon for a whole family to attempt to reinhabit their old cabin in this way. The planters attributed these expensive deeds of manumission to a depraved taste or mania; but we do not know that they laid Greek under contribution for a term, as Dr. Cartwright did, who applied the worddrapetomaniato the malady of the American fugitive. Many negroes sought relief in a marooning life; but their number was not so great as we might expect. After two or three days' experience, hunger and exposure drove them back, if they were not caught before. The number of permanent maroons did not reach a thousand.
But a few tribes were so turbulent and sullen that the planter avoided buying them, unless his need of field-hands was very urgent. He was obliged to be circumspect, however; for the traders knew how to jockey a man with a sick, disabled, or impracticable negro. The Jews made a good business of buying refuse negroes and furbishing them up for the market. The French traders thought it merit to deceive a Jew; but the latter feigned to be abjectly helpless, in order to enjoy this refitting branch of the business.
The Coromantine negroes were especial objects of suspicion, on account of their quarrelsome and incendiary temper. Such powerful and capable men ought to have valued more highly the privileges of their position; but they could never quite conquer their prejudices, and were continually interpreting the excellent constitutional motto,Vera pro gratis, into,Liberty instead of sugar!An English physician of the last century, James Grainger by name, wrote a poem in four books upon the "Sugar-Cane," published in 1764. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he exhibited a dose; but the production yields the following lines which show that the Coromantine of Jamaica was no better than his brother of San Domingo:—
"Yet, if thine own, thy children's life, be dear,Buy not a Cormantee, though healthy, young,Of breed too generous for the servile field:They, born to freedom in their native land,Choose death before dishonorable bonds;Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hourSudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,And thine own poniard bury in thy breast."
All these kinds of negroes, and many others whom it would be tedious to mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went to mass as to their favoriteCalenda; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness, appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a greatGree-gree;the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their midnight serpent-worship. The priests were white men, for the negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error. The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day's toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds. But the curates declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper. On the whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the noises in a church. He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite. What elevating influence could there be in the Colonial Church for these children of Nature, who were annually reinforcing Church and Colony at a frightful pace with heathenism? Twenty or thirty tribes of pagans were imported at the rate of twenty thousand living heads per annum, turned loose and mixed together, with a sense of original wrong and continual cruelty rankling amid their crude and wild emotions, and prized especially for their alleged deficiency of soul, and animal ability to perform unwholesome labor. Slavery never wore so black a face. The only refining element was the admixture of superior tribes, a piece of good-fortune for the colony, which the planter endeavored as far as possible to miss by distributing the fresh cargoes according to their native characters. A fresh Eboe was put under the tutelage of a naturalized Eboe, a Jolof with a Jolof, and so on: their depressed and unhealthy condition upon landing, and their ignorance of the Creole dialect, rendered this expedient.[J]
[Footnote H: Sometimes Fetichism furnished a legend which Catholicism, in its best estate, would not despise. Here is one that belongs to the Akwapim country, which lies north of Akkra, and is tributary to Ashantee. "They say that Odomañkama created all things. He created the earth, the trees, stones, and men. He showed men what they ought to eat, and also said to them, 'Whenever anybody does anything that is lovely, think about it, and do it also, only do not let your eye grow red' (that is, inflamed, lustful). When He had finished the creation. He left men and went to heaven; and when He went, the Fetiches came hither from the mountains and the sea. Now, touching these Fetiches, as well as departed spirits, they are not God, neither created by God, but He has only given them permission, at their request, to come to men. For which reason no Fetich ever receives permission to slay a man, except directly from the Creator."—Petermann'sMittheiltungen, 1856, p. 466.]
[Footnote I:Droit Public des Colonies Françoises, d'après les Lois faites pour ces Pays, Tom. I. p. 306.]
[Footnote J: On the other hand, an elaborateManuel des Habitans de St. Dominguecautions the planters on this point: "Carefully avoid abandoning the new negroes to the discretion of the old ones, who are often very glad to play the part of hosts for the sake of such valets, to whom they make over the rudest part of their day's work. This produces disgust and repugnance in the new-comers, who cannot yet bear to be ordered about, least of all to be maltreated by negroes like themselves, while, on the contrary, they submit willingly and with affection to the orders of a white." This Manual, which reads like a treatise on muck or the breeding of cattle, proceeds to say, that, if the planter would preserve his negroes' usefulness, he must be careful to keep off the ticks.]
But these distinctions could not be preserved upon such a limited area and amid these jostling tribes. People of a dozen latitudes swarmed in the cabins of a single negro-quarter. Even the small planter could not stock his habitation with a single kind of negro: the competition at each trade-sale of slaves prevented it. So did a practice of selling them by the scramble. This was to shut two or three hundred of them into a large court-yard, where they were all marked at the same price, and the gates thrown open to purchasers. A greedy crowd rushed in, with yells and fighting, each man struggling to procure a quota, by striking them with his fists, tying handkerchiefs or pieces of string to them, fastening tags around their necks, regardless of tribe, family, or condition. The negroes, not yet recovered from their melancholy voyage, were amazed and panic-stricken at this horrible onslaught of avaricious men; they frequently scaled the walls, and ran frantically up and down the town.
As soon as the slaves were procured, by sale on shipboard, by auction, or by scramble, they received the private marks of their owners. Each planter had a silver plate, perforated with his letter, figure, or cipher, which he used to designate his own slaves by branding. If two planters happened to be using the same mark, the brand was placed upon different spots of the body. The heated plate, with an interposing piece of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the hand of God!
By this fusion of native races a Creole nation of slaves was slowly formed and maintained. The old qualities were not lost, but new qualities resulted from the new conditions. Thebozalnegro was easily to be distinguished from the Creole.Bozalis from the Spanish, meaningmuzzled, that is, ignorant of the Creole language and not able to talk.[K] Creole French was created by the negroes, who put into it very few words of their native dialects, but something of the native construction, and certain euphonic peculiarities. It is interesting to trace their love of alliteration and a concord of sounds in this mongrel French, which became a new colonial language. The bright and sparkling French appears as if submitted to great heat and just on the point of running together. There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this:Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this native disposition. The alliteration is sometimes obscured by elisions and contractions, but never quite disappears. Mr. Grout says: "So strong is the influence of this inclination to concord produced by the repetition of initials, that it controls the distinction of number, and quite subordinates that of gender, and tends to mould the pronoun after the likeness of the initial element of the noun to which it refers; as,Izintombi zake zi ya hamba, 'The daughters of him they do walk.'" These characteristics appear in the formation of the Creole French, in connection with another childlike habit of the negro, who loves to put himself in the objective case, and to saymeinstead ofI, as if he knew that he had to be a chattel.
[Footnote K: In Cuba, the slave who had lived upon the island long enough to learn the language was calledLadino, "versed in an idiom."]
[Footnote L:American Oriental Society, Vol. I. p. 423,et seq.]
The articleun, une, could not have been pronounced by a negro. It became in his mouthnion. The personal pronounsje, tu, il, were converted intomo, to, ly, and the possessivemon, ton, sonintoà moue, à toue, à ly, and were placed after the noun, which negro dialects generally start their sentences with. Possessive pronouns had the unmeaning syllablequienbefore them, as,Nous gagné quien à nous, forNous avons les nôtres; and demonstrative pronouns were changed in this way:Mo voir z'animaux là yo, forJ'ai vu ces animaux, andCi la yo qui té vivre,forCeux qui ont vécu.A few more examples will suffice to make other changes clear. A negro was asked to lend his horse; he replied,Mouchée(Monsieur),mo pas gagné choual, mais mo connais qui gagné ly; si ly pas gagné ly, ly faut mo gagné ly, pour vous gagné: "Massa, me no got horse, but me know who got um; if him no got um, him get me um for you."Quelquechosebecomesquichou; zozo = oiseau; gourneé = combattre; gueté = voir; zombi = revenant; bougé = demeurer; helé = appeler,etc.[M]
[Footnote M: Harvey'sSketches of Haiti, p. 292. See a vocabulary inManuel des Habitans de St. Domingue,par L.J. Ducoeurjoly, Tom. II. Here is a verse of a Creole song, written in imitation of the negro dialect:—
Dipi mo perdi Lisette,Mo pas souchié Calinda,[A]Mo quitté bram-bram sonette,Mo pas batte bamboula.[B]Quand mo contré l'aut' negresse,Mo pas gagné z'yeu pour ly;Mo pas souchié travail piece,Tou qui chose a moué mouri.
The French of which is as follows:—
Mes pas, loin de ma Lisette,S'éloiguent du Calinda;Et ma ceinture à sonnetteLanguit sur mon bamboula.Mon oeil de toute autre belleN'aperçoit plus le souris;Le travail en vain m'appelle,Mes sens sont anéantis.
[Footnote A: A favorite dance.]
[Footnote B: A kind of tambourine or drum made of a keg stretched with skins, and sometimes hung with bells.]]
The dialect thus formed by the aid of traits common to many negro tribes was a solution into which their differences fell to become modified; when the barriers of language were broken down, the common African nature, with all its good and evil, appeared in a Creole form. The forced labor, the caprice of masters, and the cruel supervision of the overseers engendered petty vices of theft, concealment, and hypocrisy. The slave became meaner than the native African in all respects; even his passions lost their extravagant sincerity, but part of the manliness went with it. Intelligence, ability, adroitness were exercised in a languid way; rude and impetuous tribes became more docile and manageable, but those who were already disposed to obedience did not find either motive or influence to lift their natures into a higher life. An average slave-character, not difficult to govern, but without instinct to improve, filled the colony. A colonist would hardly suspect the fiery Africa whose sun ripened the ancestors of his slaves, unless he caught them by accident in the midst of their voluptuousCalenda, or watched behind some tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism. A slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all the iron tools and implements of the colony. The gentler traits of the African character, mirth and jollity, affectionateness, domestic love, regard and even reverence for considerate masters, were the least impaired; for these, with a powerful religiosity, are indigenous, like the baobab and palm, and give a great accent to the name of Africa. What other safeguard had a planter with his wife and children, who lived with thirty slaves or more, up to six hundred, upon solitary plantations that were seldom visited by themaréchaussée,or rural police? The root of such a domination was less in the white man's superiority than in the docile ability of those who ought to have been his natural enemies. "Totidem esse hostes quot servos" said Seneca; but he was thinking of the Scythian and Germanic tribes. A North-American Indian, or a Carib, though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued. Marooning occurred every day, and cases of poisoning, perpetrated generally by Ardra negroes, who were addicted to serpent-worship, were not infrequent; but they poisoned a rival or an enemy of their own race as often as a white man. The "Affiches Américaines," which was published weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very rare: a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus frightened Spaniards from the colony. If this be so in an island whose slaves were continually reinforced by native Africans, bringing Paganism to be confirmed by a corrupt Catholicism, where every influence was wanton and debased, and the plantation-cruelties, as we shall shortly see, outheroded everything that slave-holding annals can reveal, how much less likely is it that we shall find the slave insurrectionary in the United States, whence the slave-trade has been excluded for nearly two generations, and where the African, modified by climate, and by religious exercises of his own which are in harmony with his native disposition and enjoin him not to be of a stout mind, waits prayerfully till liberty shall be proclaimed! If the slaveholder ever lived in dread, it was not so much from what he expected as from what he knew that he deserved. But the African is more merciful than the conscience of a slaveholder. Blessed are these meek ones: they shall yet inherit earth in America!
France was always more humane than her colonies, for every rising sun did not rekindle there the dreadful paradox that sugar and sweetness were incompatible, and she could not taste the stinging lash as the crystals melted on her tongue.[N] An ocean rolled between. She always endeavored to protect the slave by legislation; but the Custom of Paris, when it was gentle, was doubly distasteful to the men who knew how impracticable it was. Louis XIII. would not admit that a single slave lived in his dominions, till the priests convinced him that it was possible through the slave-trade to baptize the Ethiopian again. Louis XIV. issued the famousCode Noirin 1685, when the colonists had already begun to shoot a slave for a saucy gesture, and to hire buccaneers to hunt marooning negroes at ten dollars per head.[O]
[Footnote N: There was a proverb as redoubtably popular as Solomon's "Spare the rod"; it originated in Brazil, where the natives were easily humiliated:—"Regarder un sauvage de travers, c'est le battre; le battre, c'es le tuer: battre un nègre, c'est le nourrir": Looking hard at a savage is beating him: beating is the death of him: but to beat a negro is bread and meat to him.]
[Footnote O: A Commissioner's fee under the Fugitive-Slave Bill. History will repeat herself to emphasize the natural and inalienable rights of slave-catchers. In 1706 the planters organized a permanent force of maroon-hunters, twelve men to each quarter of the island, who received the annual stipend of three hundred livres. In addition to this, the owners paid thirty livres for each slave caught in the canes or roads, forty-five for each captured beyond themornes, and sixty for those who escaped to more distant places. The hunters might fire at the slave, if he could not be otherwise stopped, and draw the same sums. In 1711 the maroons became so insolent that the planters held four regular chases orbattuesper annum.]
TheCode Noirwas the basis of all the colonial legislation which affected the condition of the slave, and it is important to notice its principal articles. We have only room to present them reduced to their essential substance.
Negroes must be instructed in the Catholic religion, andbozalsmust be baptized within eight days after landing. All overseers must be Catholic. Sundays andfêtedays are days of rest for the negro; no sale of negroes or any other commodity can take place on those days.
Free men who have children by slaves, and masters who permit the connection, are liable to a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar. If the guilty person be a master, his slave and her children are confiscated for the benefit of the hospital, and cannot be freed.
If a free man is not married to any white person during concubinage with his slave, and shall marry said slave, she and her children shall become enfranchised.
No consent of father and mother is essential for marriage between slaves, but no master can constrain slaves to marry against their will.
If a slave has a free black or colored woman for his wife, the male and female children shall follow the condition of the mother; and if a slave-woman has a free husband, the children shall follow his condition.
The weekly ration for a slave of ten years old and upwards consists of five Paris pints of manioc meal, or three cassava loaves, each weighing two and a half pounds, with two pounds of salt beef, or three of fish, or other things in proportion, but never any tafia[P] in the place of a ration; and no master can avoid giving a slave his ration by offering him a day for his own labor. Weaned children to the age of ten are entitled to half the above ration. Each slave must also have two suits of clothes yearly, or cloth in proportion.
[Footnote P: A coarse rum distilled from the sugar-cane.]
Slaves who are not properly nourished and clothed by their masters can lodge a complaint against them. If it be well-founded, the masters can be prosecuted without cost to the slave.
Slaves who are old, infirm, diseased, whether incurable or not, must be supported. If they are abandoned by masters, they are to be sent to the hospital, and the masters must pay six sols daily for their support.
A slave's testimony can be received as a statement to serve the courts in procuring light elsewhere; but no judge can draw presumption, conjecture, or proof therefrom.
The slave who strikes his master or mistress, or their children, so as to draw blood, or in the face, may be punished even with death; and all excesses or offences committed by slaves against free persons shall be severely punished, even with death, if the case shall warrant.
Any free or enfranchised person who shall shelter a fugitive shall be fined three hundred pounds of sugar for each day.
A slave who is condemned to death shall be valued before execution, and the estimated price paid to the master, provided the latter has not made a pretended complaint.
Masters may chain and whip their slaves, but not mutilate, torture, or kill them.
If a master or overseer shall kill a slave, he shall be prosecuted; but if he can convince the court of cause, he may be discharged without pardon from the King.
Masters who are twenty years old can free their slaves at will or by testamentary act, without being held to give a reason for it; and if a slave is named by testament a general legatee, or an executor, or guardian of children, he shall be considered enfranchised.
An enfranchised slave shall be regarded as free as any person born in France, without letters of naturalization; he can enjoy the advantages of natives everywhere, even if he was born in a foreign country.
An enfranchised slave must pay singular respect to his ancient master, his widow, and children; an injury done to them will be punished more severely than if done to others. But he is free, and quit of all service, charge, and tenure that may be pretended by his former master, either respecting his person or property and succession.
An enfranchised slave shall enjoy the same rights, privileges, and immunities as if he had been born free. The King desires that he may merit his acquired liberty, and that it may confer upon him, as well in his person as estate, the same effects which the blessing of natural liberty confers upon French subjects.
* * * * *
The last article, and all that related to enfranchisement, are notable for their political effect upon the colony. The free mulattoes interpreted the liberal clauses of the Code into an extension of the rights of citizenship to them, as the natural inference from their freed condition. The lust of masters and the defencelessness of the slave-woman sowed thickly another retribution in the fated soil.
The custom of enfranchising children of mixed blood, and sometimes their mothers, commenced in the earliest times of the French colonies, when the labor ofengagéswas more valuable than that of slaves, and the latter were objects of buccaneering license as much as of profit. The colonist could not bear to see his offspring inventoried as chattels. In this matter the nations of the South of Europe appear to atone for acts of passion by after-thoughts of humanity. The free descendants of mulattoes who were enfranchised by French masters in Louisiana, and who form a respectable and flourishing class in that State, now stand beneath the American flag at the call of General Butler. But the Anglo-American alone seems willing to originate a chattel and to keep him so. His passion will descend as low for gratification as a Frenchman's or a Spaniard's, but his heart will not afterwards mount as high.
Acts of enfranchisement required at first the sanction of the Government, until in 1682 the three sovereign courts of St. Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe offered the project of a law which favored enfranchisements; it led to the articles upon that subject in the Edict of 1685, quoted above, which sought at once to restrain the license of masters and to afford them a legal way to be humane and just.[Q]
[Footnote Q: Other motives became influential as soon as the slaves discovered their advantages. A master in want of money would offer emancipation for a certain sum; the slave would employ every means, even the most illicit, to raise the amount upon which his or her freedom depended. A female slave would demand emancipation for herself or for some relative as her price for yielding to a master; attractive negresses wielded a great deal of power in this way. A great evil arose from testamentary acts of enfranchisement, or equivalent promises; for the slave in question would sometimes poison his master to hasten the day of liberty. On the other hand, many masters of the nobler kind emancipated their slaves as a reward for services: the rearing of six living children, thirty years of field or domestic labor without marooning, industry, economy, attachment, the discovery of a poisoning scheme or of anémeute, saving the life of a white person with great risk,—all these were occasional reasons for enfranchisement.]
In 1703 there were only one hundred and fifty freed persons in San Domingo. In 1711 a colonial ordinance proscribed every enfranchisement which did not have the approbation of the colonial government. The King sanctioned this ordinance in 1713, and declared that all masters who neglected the formality should lose their slaves by confiscation.
In 1736 the number of freed slaves, black and mulatto, was two thousand. The Government, alarmed at the increase, imposed a sum upon the master for each act of enfranchisement, in the hope to check his license. But the master evaded this and every other salutary provision; the place and climate, so distant from the Custom of Paris, where men dishonored only complexions like their own, lent occasion and immunity. Colonial Nature was more potent than paper restrictions. In 1750 there were four thousand freed persons.
But the desire of enfranchising children was so great that the colonists evaded all the regulations, which multiplied yearly, by taking their slaves to France, where they became free as soon as their feet pressed the soil. The only measure which the Government could devise to meet this evasion was to forbid all men of color to contract marriages in France.
In 1787 the free persons of color in San Domingo numbered 19,632. In 1790 their numbers were 25,000.
In 1681 the white inhabitants of San Domingo numbered four thousand; but in 1790, notwithstanding a constant tide of emigration from Europe, they numbered only thirty thousand.
The number of slaves at the same time was about four hundred thousand, a number which represents the violent removal of several millions of black men from Africa: some writers not anti-slavery reckon this tremendous crime of the white man at ten millions!
What a climate, and what a system, in which only the mulatto thrives!
* * * * *
Thus far we have traced the causes and elements, of Nature, race, and policy, the passions and peculiarities of many kinds of men, which culminated at length, in no fair forms of humanity nor beneficent institutions, but in the foremost sugar-plantation of the world, whose cane-rows were planted and nourished by the first of crimes, whose juice was expressed by over-hasty avarice and petulant ambition that could not be satisfied unless the crime preserved features as colossal as the passion of the hour.
We are now in a condition to perceive that the Horrors of San Domingo were those of suicide. Bloody licentiousness lays violent hands upon its life. Its weaknesses were full of fatal vigor, lust poisoned the humanity which it inspired, the soil of the buccaneer could raise nothing which was not exuberant with vengeance. Slave-Insurrection was a mere accidental episode in the closing scenes of this bad and blundering career.
* * * * *
One of our English summers looks, in the retrospect, as if it had been patched with more frequent sunshine than the sky of England ordinarily affords; but I believe that it may be only a moral effect,—a "light that never was on sea nor land,"—caused by our having found a particularly delightful abode in the neighborhood of London. In order to enjoy it, however, I was compelled to solve the problem of living in two places at once,—an impossibility which I so far accomplished as to vanish, at frequent intervals, out of men's sight and knowledge on one side of England, and take my place in a circle of familiar faces on the other, so quietly that I seemed to have been there all along. It was the easier to get accustomed to our new residence, because it was not only rich in all the material properties of a home, but had also the home-like atmosphere, the household element, which is of too intangible a character to be let even with the most thoroughly furnished lodging-house. A friend had given us his suburban residence, with all its conveniences, elegancies, and snuggeries,—its drawing-rooms and library, still warm and bright with the recollection of the genial presences that we had known there,—its closets, chambers, kitchen, and even its wine-cellar, if we could have availed ourselves of so dear and delicate a trust,—its lawn and cozy garden-nooks, and whatever else makes up the multitudinous idea of an English home,—he had transferred it all to us, pilgrims and dusty wayfarers, that we might rest and take our case during his summer's absence on the Continent. We had long been dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shivering by hearths which, heap the bituminous coal upon them as we might, no blaze could render cheerful. I remember, to this day, the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden; while the portrait of the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it. But now, at last, we were in a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted people had just been living their daily life, and had left us a summer's inheritance of slowly ripened days, such as a stranger's hasty opportunities so seldom permit him to enjoy.
Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world, (which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may allow to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's Cathedral,) it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about by the turbulence of the vast London-whirlpool. But I had drifted into a still eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with a good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary haven more attractive than anything that the great town could offer. I already knew London well; that is to say, I had long ago satisfied (so far as it was capable of satisfaction) that mysterious yearning—the magnetism of millions of hearts operating upon one—which impels every man's individuality to mingle itself with the immensest mass of human life within his scope. Day after day, at an earlier period, I had trodden the thronged thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the lanes, alleys, and strange labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens and inclosures of ancient studious societies, so retired and silent amid the city-uproar, the markets, the foggy streets along the river-side, the bridges,—I had sought all parts of the metropolis, in short, with an unweariable and indiscriminating curiosity; until few of the native inhabitants, I fancy, had turned so many of its corners as myself. These aimless wanderings (in which my prime purpose and achievement were to lose my way, and so to find it the more surely) had brought me, at one time or another, to the sight and actual presence of almost all the objects and renowned localities that I had read about, and which had made London the dream-city of my youth. I had found it better than my dream; for there is nothing else in life comparable (in that species of enjoyment, I mean) to the thick, heavy, oppressive, sombre delight which an American is sensible of, hardly knowing whether to call it a pleasure or a pain, in the atmosphere of London. The result was, that I acquired a home-feeling there, as nowhere else in the world,—though afterwards I came to have a somewhat similar sentiment in regard to Rome; and as long as either of those two great cities shall exist, the cities of the Past and of the Present, a man's native soil may crumble beneath his feet without leaving him altogether homeless upon earth.
Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence, I was in a manner free of the city, and could approach or keep away from it as I pleased. Hence it happened, that, living within a quarter of an hour's rush of the London Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a whole summer-day in our garden than to seek anything new or old, wonderful or commonplace, beyond its precincts. It was a delightful garden, of no great extent, but comprising a good many facilities for repose and enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats, shrubbery, flower-beds, rose-bushes in a profusion of bloom, pinks, poppies, geraniums, sweet-peas, and a variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to recognize individually, yet had always a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky of England has a most happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in this garden, as everywhere else, the exuberance of English verdure had a greater charm than any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves forever. Conscious of the triumph of England in this respect; and loyally anxious for the credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in producing a few sour plums and abortive pears and apples,—as, for example, in this very garden, where a row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a cruel and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce rich fruit by torture. For my part, I never ate an English fruit, raised in the open air, that could compare in flavor with a Yankee turnip.
The garden included that prime feature of English domestic scenery, a lawn. It had been levelled, carefully shorn, and converted into a bowling-green, on which we sometimes essayed to practise the time-honored game of bowls, most unskilfully, yet not without a perception that it involves a very pleasant mixture of exercise and ease, as is the case with most of the old English pastimes. Our little domain was shut in by the house on one side, and in other directions by a hedge-fence and a brick wall, which last was concealed or softened by shrubbery and the impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the outer region, beyond our immediate precincts, there was an abundance of foliage, tossed aloft from the near or distant trees with which that agreeable suburb is adorned. The effect was wonderfully sylvan and rural, insomuch that we might have fancied ourselves in the depths of a wooded seclusion; only that, at brief intervals, we could hear the galloping sweep of a railway-train passing within a quarter of a mile, and its discordant screech, moderated by a little farther distance, as it reached the Blackheath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me out so inevitably, was the voice of the great world summoning me forth. I know not whether I was the more pained or pleased to be thus constantly put in mind of the neighborhood of London; for, on the one hand, my conscience stung me a little for reading a book, or playing with children in the grass, when there were so many better things for an enlightened traveller to do,—while, at the same time, it gave a deeper delight to my luxurious idleness, to contrast it with the turmoil which I escaped. On the whole, however, I do not repent of a single wasted hour, and only wish that I could have spent twice as many in the same way; for the impression in my memory is, that I was as happy in that hospitable garden as the English summer-day was long.
One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England, where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind between February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet, chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer, scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September, small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's atmospherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent sombreness may have brought out those sunny intervals in such high relief, that I see them, in my recollection, brighter than they really were: a little light makes a glory for people who live habitually in a gray gloom. The English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the sea-side with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing mid-leg deep in pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows would deem little more than barely comfortable. To myself, after the summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might be a little too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough. During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire on the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the succeeding years—whether that I had renewed my fibre with English beef and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were the cause—I grew content with winter and especially in love with summer, desiring little more for happiness than merely to breathe and bask. At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess the noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable; so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sun-dial that reckoned up the hours of an almost interminable day.
For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer-day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is bed-time again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the by-gone day beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island, that Tomorrow is born before Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them. I had earned this repose by a long course of irksome toil and perturbation, and could have been content never to stray out of the limits of that suburban villa and its garden. If I lacked anything beyond, it would have satisfied me well enough to dream about it, instead of struggling for its actual possession. At least, this was the feeling of the moment; although the transitory, flitting, and irresponsible character of my life there was perhaps the most enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much of the comfort of house and home without any sense of their weight upon my back. The nomadic life has great advantages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us at every stage.
So much for the interior of our abode,—a spot of deepest quiet, within reach of the intensest activity. But, even when we stepped beyond our own gate, we were not shocked with any immediate presence of the great world. We were dwelling in one of those oases that have grown up (in comparatively recent years, I believe) on the wide waste of Blackheath, which otherwise offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in singular proximity to the metropolis. As a general thing, the proprietorship of the soil seems to exist in everybody and nobody; but exclusive rights have been obtained, here and there, chiefly by men whose daily concerns link them with London, so that you find their villas or boxes standing along village-streets which have often more of an American aspect than the elder English settlements. The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental trees overshadow the sidewalks, and grassy margins border the wheel-tracks. The houses, to be sure, have certain points of difference from those of an American village, bearing tokens of architectural design, though seldom of individual taste; and, as far as possible, they stand aloof from the street, and separated each from its neighbor by hedge or fence, in accordance with the careful exclusiveness of the English character, which impels the occupant, moreover, to cover the front of his dwelling with as much concealment of shrubbery as his limits will allow. Through the interstices, you catch glimpses of well-kept lawns, generally ornamented with flowers, and with what the English call rock-work, being heaps of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for romantic effect in a small way. Two or three of such village-streets as are here described take a collective name,—as, for instance, Blackheath Park,—and constitute a kind of community of residents, with gate-ways, kept by policemen, and a semi-privacy, stepping beyond which, you find yourself on the breezy heath.
On this great, bare, dreary common I often went astray, as I afterwards did on the Campagna of Rome, and drew the air (tainted with London smoke though it might be) into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange and unexpected sense of desert-freedom. The misty atmosphere helps you to fancy a remoteness that perhaps does not quite exist. During the little time that it lasts, the solitude is as impressive as that of a Western prairie or forest; but soon the railway-shriek, a mile or two away, insists upon informing you of your whereabout; or you recognize in the distance some landmark that you may have known,—an insulated villa, perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the rudimental street of a new settlement which is sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half a century ago, the most frequent token of man's beneficent contiguity might have been a gibbet, and the creak, like a tavern-sign, of a murderer swinging to and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen and footpads, was dangerous in those days; and even now, for aught I know, the Western prairie may still compare favorably with it as a safe region to go astray in. When I was acquainted with Blackheath, the ingenious device of garroting had recently come into fashion; and I can remember, while crossing those waste places at midnight, and hearing footsteps behind me, to have been sensibly encouraged by also hearing, not far off, the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the horse-patrols who do regular duty there. About sunset, or a little later, was the time when the broad and somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath seemed to me to put on its utmost impressiveness. At that hour, finding myself on elevated ground, I once had a view of immense London, four or five miles off, with the vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the two Houses of Parliament rising up into the smoky canopy, the thinner substance of which obscured a mass of things, and hovered about the objects that were most distinctly visible,—a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, awful, but irresistibly attractive, like a young man's dream of the great world, foretelling at that distance a grandeur never to be fully realized.
While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of two or three sets of cricket-players were constantly pitched on Blackheath, and matches were going forward that seemed to involve the honor and credit of communities or counties, exciting an interest in everybody but myself, who cared not what part of England might glorify itself at the expense of another. It is necessary to be born an Englishman, I believe, in order to enjoy this great national game; at any rate, as a spectacle for an outside observer, I found it lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of pictorial effects. Choice of other amusements was at hand. Butts for archery were established, and bows and arrows were to be let, at so many shots for a penny,—there being abundance of space for a farther flight-shot than any modern archer can lend to his shaft. Then there was an absurd game of throwing a stick at crockery-ware, which I have witnessed a hundred times, and personally engaged in once or twice, without ever having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery. In other spots, you found donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a very meek and patient spirit, on which the Cockney pleasure-seekers of both sexes rode races and made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way of refreshment there was gingerbread, (but, as a true patriot, I must pronounce it greatly inferior to our native dainty,) and ginger-beer, and probably stancher liquor among the booth-keeper's hidden stores. The frequent railway-trains, as well as the numerous steamers to Greenwich, have made the vacant portions of Blackheath a play-ground and breathing-place for the Londoners, readily and very cheaply accessible; so that, in view of this broader use and enjoyment, I a little grudged the tracts that have been filched away, so to speak, and individualized by thriving citizens. One sort of visitors especially interested me: they were schools of little boys or girls, under the guardianship of their instructors,—charity-schools, as I often surmised from their aspect, collected among dark alleys and squalid courts; and hither they were brought to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little progeny of the sunless nooks of London, who had never known that the sky was any broader than that narrow and vapory strip above their native lane. I fancied that they took but a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray out of her arms.
Passing among these holiday-people, we come to one of the gate-ways of Greenwich Park, opening through an old brick wall. It admits us from the bare heath into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland ornament, traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many of which bear tokens of a venerable age. These broad and well-kept pathways rise and decline over the elevations and along the bases of gentle hills which diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest and most abrupt of them (though but of very moderate height) is one of the earth's noted summits, and may hold up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all nations will consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe begins. I used to regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the Observatory-wall, and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time and Space.
There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood of London, richer scenes of greensward and cultivated trees; and Kensington, especially, in a summer afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can or ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we must quit. But Greenwich, too, is beautiful,—a spot where the art of man has conspired with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords one of the instances in which the monarch's property is actually the people's, and shows how much more natural is their relation to the sovereign than to the nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening space between the two: for a nobleman makes a paradise only for himself, and fills it with his own pomp and pride; whereas the people are sooner or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create, as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and even on those grim and sombre days when, if it do not actually rain, the English persist in calling it fine weather, it was good to see how sturdily the plebeians trod under their own oaks, and what fulness of simple enjoyment they evidently found there. They were the people,—not the populace,—specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct kind of garb from their week-day ones; and this, in England, implies wholesome habits of life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I longed to be acquainted with them, in order to investigate what manner of folks they were, what sort of households they kept, their politics, their religion, their tastes, and whether they were as narrow-minded as their betters. There can be very little doubt of it: an Englishman is English, in whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I should imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than as a member of Parliament.