by Noel Rae
Ironically, that very day Fanny had been given proof that “it was impossible to believe a single word any of these people said”—though not in the way Mr. Butler intended. A young slave named Jack had been assigned to accompany Fanny “in my roamings about the island and rowing expeditions on the river.” Jack was bright and inquisitive. “His questions, like those of an intelligent child, are absolutely inexhaustible; his curiosity about all things beyond this island, the prison house of his existence, is perfectly intense … Today, in the midst of his torrent of inquires about places and things, I suddenly asked him if he would like to be free. A gleam of light absolutely shot over his whole countenance, like vivid and instantaneous lightning. He stammered, hesitated, became excessively confused, and at length replied, ‘Free, missis? What for me wish to be free? Oh no, missis, me no wish to be free …’ The fear of offending by uttering that forbidden wish—the dread of admitting, by its expression, the slightest discontent with his present situation—the desire to conciliate my favor, even at the expense of strangling the intense natural longing that absolutely glowed in his every feature—it was a sad spectacle, and I repented my question.”
Fanny’s outspoken sympathy for the slaves eventually got her in trouble with her husband. As was normal for those times, she spoke of him as “Mr. Butler,” and thought of herself as “belonging” to him and owing him obedience. “I have had a most painful conversation with Mr. Butler, who has declined receiving any of the people’s petitions through me,” she wrote to Elizabeth Sedgwick. “‘Why do you listen to such stuff?’” he had asked. “‘Why do you believe such trash? Don’t you know the niggers are all d—d liars?’” In future she was “to bring him no more complaints or requests of any sort.” She thought of returning to the North—“this is no place for me, since I was not born among slaves and cannot bear to live among them.” But to leave would be a drastic step; instead there was “the blessed refuge of abundant tears,” and the reflection that “God will provide. He has not forgotten, nor will He forsake these His poor children.”
In the meantime the list of sufferers grew longer: Charlotte and Judy, who had been forced to return to work in the field three weeks after giving birth; Louisa, who had run away and hidden in a rattlesnake-infested swamp to escape a flogging and had returned almost dead with hunger; Fanny, “who has had six children, all dead but one,” and asked to have her work load lightened; Sarah, who “had had four miscarriages, had brought seven children into the world, five of whom were dead, and was again with child. She complained of dreadful pains in the back, and an internal tumor which swells with the exertion of working in the fields; probably, I think, she is ruptured.” Sarah also had bouts of insanity. So did Judy, who had run away but was caught, “brought back, and punished by being made to sit, day after day, for hours in the stocks—a severe punishment for a man, but for a woman perfectly barbarous.” Judy’s first-born was the child of the former overseer, Mr. King, “who had forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound—a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished.” Then there was “a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages; nine of her children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in the field.” And there was Die. “She had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages; one had been caused with falling down with a very heavy burden on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed.”
“And to all this I listen,” wrote Fanny. “I, an Englishwoman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, ‘That thing shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villainy shall never be known here again.’” All she could do was give small presents of rice, sugar or flannel cloth, and remain “choking with indignation and grief … And never forget that the people on this plantation are well off, and consider themselves well off, in comparison with the slaves on some of the neighboring estates.”
One particular incident occurred quite early in their visit, when Fanny was still in her husband’s good graces. It concerned a young house slave called Psyche, notable for “the perfect sweetness of her expression” and for the fact that she was always “sad and silent,” with “an air of melancholy and timidity.” Eventually Psyche revealed what was troubling her: she was not sure who owned her and her two small children. She knew that at one time they had been the property of Mr. King, the former overseer, who was there on a visit, but were they still? King had recently bought a plantation of his own in Alabama, and Psyche feared that they might have to go there, which would mean being separated from her husband Joe, “a fine, intelligent, active, excellent young man.” Joe belonged to Mr. Butler, so now Psyche asked Fanny to ask him to buy her too. “Now, Elizabeth,” wrote Fanny, “just conceive for one moment the state of mind of this woman, believing herself to belong to a man who in a few days was going down to one of those abhorred and dreaded Southwestern states, and who would then compel her, with her poor little children, to leave her husband and the only home she had ever known, and all the ties of affection, relationship, and association of her former life … Do you think I wondered any more at the woebegone expression of her countenance?”
Before she had a chance to talk with her husband, Fanny met Mr. Oden, the current overseer. “I asked him about Psyche, and who was her proprietor when, to my infinite surprise, he told me that he had bought her and her children from Mr. King, who had offered them to him saying that they would be rather troublesome to him than otherwise down where he was going. ‘And so,’ said Mr. Oden, ‘as I had no objection to investing a little money that way, I bought them.’ With a heart much lightened, I flew to tell poor Psyche the news so that, at any rate, she might be relieved from the dread of any immediate separation from her husband.” But that was not the end of the story.
“Early the next morning, while I was still dressing, I was suddenly startled by hearing voices in loud tones in Mr. Butler’s dressing room, which adjoins my bedroom, the noise increasing until there was an absolute cry of despair uttered by some man. I could restrain myself no longer, but opened the door of communication and saw Joe, the young man, poor Psyche’s husband, raving almost in a state of frenzy, and in a voice broken with sobs and almost inarticulate with passion, reiterating his determination never to leave this plantation, never to go to Alabama, never to leave his old father and mother, his poor wife and children, and dashing his hat, which he had been wringing like a cloth in his hands, upon the ground, he declared he would kill himself if he was compelled to follow Mr. King. I glanced from the poor wretch to Mr. Butler, who was standing leaning against a table with his arms folded, occasionally uttering a few words of counsel to his slave to be quiet and not fret, and not make a fuss about what there was no help for.” Withdrawing from the scene, Fanny went to find Mr. Oden and asked him if he knew the cause of Joe’s distress. “He then told me that Mr. Butler, who is highly pleased with Mr. King’s past administration of his property, wished, on his departure for his newly acquired slave plantation, to give him some token of his satisfaction, and had made him a present of the man Joe, who had just received the intelligence that he was to go down to Alabama with his new owner the next day, leaving father, mother, wife and children behind.”
As soon as she met up with her husband, Fanny “appealed to him, for his own soul’s sake, not to commit so great cruelty—how I cried, and how I adjured, and how all my sense of justice and of mercy, and of pity for the poor wretch, and of wretchedness at finding myself implicated in such a state of things, broke in torrents of words from my lips and tears from my eyes! God knows such a sorrow at seeing anyone I belonged to commit such an act was indeed a new and terrible experience to me, and it seemed to me that I was imploring Mr. Butler to save himself more tha
n to spare these wretches.”
Her husband gave “no answer whatever,” but later that evening Mr. Oden came into the living room and sat down to look over some accounts. Fanny asked him if he had seen Joe recently. “‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘He is a great deal happier than he was this morning.’
“‘Why, how is that?’ asked I eagerly.
“‘Oh, he is not going to Alabama. Mr. King heard that he had kicked up such a fuss about it’—being in despair at being torn from one’s wife and children is called kicking up a fuss; this is a sample of overseer appreciation of human feelings—‘and said that if the fellow wasn’t willing to go with him, he did not wish to be bothered with any niggers down there who were to be troublesome, so he might stay behind.’
“‘And does Psyche know this?’
“‘Yes, ma’am, I suppose so.’
“I drew a long breath …” But there remained the matter of securing Psyche’s future. The next evening Fanny, who had some money of her own from her days as an actress, being once again alone with the overseer, said, “Mr. Oden, I have a particular favor to beg of you. Promise me that you will never sell Psyche and her children without first letting me know of your intention to do so, and giving me the option of buying them.”
Mr. Oden, “a remarkably deliberate man,” put down the book he was reading and replied, “Dear me, ma’am, I am very sorry—I have sold them.”
“My mouth opened wide, but I could utter no sound, I was so dismayed and surprised; and he deliberately proceeded, ‘I didn’t know, ma’am, you see, at all, that you entertained any idea of making an investment of that nature; for I’m sure, if I had, I would willingly have sold the woman to you; but I sold her and her children this morning to Mr. Butler.’
“I jumped up and left Mr. Oden still speaking, and ran to find Mr. Butler, to thank him for what he had done, and with that will now bid you good-bye. Think, Elizabeth, how it fares with slaves on plantations where there is no crazy Englishwoman to weep, and entreat, and implore, and upbraid for them, and no master willing to listen to such appeals.”
So Psyche and Joe were saved, at least until 1859, when Pierce Butler, deeply in debt, sold 429 slaves at the largest such sale ever held in the United States. Butler pocketed some three hundred thousand dollars, out of which he personally gave one dollar to every slave sold. By then, after ten years of legal wrangling, he and Fanny were divorced and she had returned to the stage, giving immensely popular readings from Shakespeare. She did not publish her memoirs until 1863 and did so primarily to influence public opinion in England where the Tory government, in the hope that a divided America would be less of a challenge to the British Empire, was showing signs of coming out in support of the Confederacy. Much of the best reporting on slavery and the South was written by Frederick Law Olmsted, a man of many talents. As well as being a farmer, journalist, conservationist, traveler, and organizer of medical services during the Civil War, he was famous for his work as a landscape architect—Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and New York’s Central Park are among his masterpieces. No less famous in its day was his book, The Cotton Kingdom, published in 1861 and remarkable for its objectivity at a time when passions and tempers were running high.
“The Father of American Landscape Architecture,” Frederick Law Olmsted was also well-known for The Cotton Kingdom, about his travels in the South. Unlike the highly emotional works of many abolitionists, Olmsted’s style was calm and objective, condemning slavery by implication rather than exclamation.
On the train to Richmond. Dec 16, 1852. “Seeing a lady entering the car at a way-station with a family behind her, and that she was looking about to find a place where they could be seated together, I rose and offered her my seat, which had several vacancies round it. She accepted it, without thanking me, and immediately installed in it a stout Negro woman; took the adjoining seat herself, and seated the rest of the party before her. It consisted of a white girl, probably her daughter, and a bright and very pretty mulatto girl. They all talked and laughed together; and the girls munched confectionery out of the same paper, with a familiarity and closeness of intimacy that would have been noticed with astonishment, if not with manifest displeasure, in almost any chance company at the North. When the Negro is definitely a slave, it would seem that the alleged natural antipathy of the white race to associate with him is lost.
On arrival. “Richmond, at a glance from adjacent high ground, through a dull cloud of bituminous smoke, upon a lowering winter’s day, has a very picturesque appearance … But the moment it is examined at all in detail, there is but one spot in the whole picture upon which the eye is at all attracted to rest. This is the Capitol, a Grecian edifice, standing alone and finely placed on open and elevated ground, in the center of the town. It was built soon after the Revolution, and the model was obtained by Mr. Jefferson, the Minister to France, from the Maison Carrée.” However, on closer inspection, it turned out that thanks to “a parsimonious pretense of dignity,” rather than being built of marble, it was built of wood painted to look like marble, and was “nothing but a cheap stuccoed building.” (Symbolic, according to some, of Southern culture as a whole.)
Sunday street scene in Richmond. “In what I suppose to be the fashionable streets there were many more well-dressed and highly-dressed colored people than white; and among this dark gentry the finest French cloths, embroidered waistcoats, patent-leather shoes, resplendent brooches, silk hats, kid gloves, and eau de mille fleurs, were quite common. Nor was the fairer, or rather the softer sex, at all left in the shade of this splendor. Many of the colored ladies were dressed not only expensively, but with good taste and effect, after the latest Parisian mode. Some of them were very attractive in appearance, and would have produced a decided sensation in any European drawing-room.
“There was no indication of their belonging to a subject race, except that they invariably gave way to the white people they met. Once, when two of them, engaged in conversation and looking at each other, had not noticed his approach, I saw a Virginian gentleman lift his walking-stick and push a woman aside with it. In the evening I saw three rowdies, arm-in-arm, taking the whole of the sidewalk, hustle a black man off it, giving him a blow as they passed that sent him staggering into the middle of the street. As he recovered himself he began to call out to, and threaten, them. Perhaps he saw me stop, and thought I should support him, as I was certainly inclined to: ‘Can’t you find anything else to do than to be knockin’ quiet people round! You jus’ come back here, will you? Here, you! Don’t care if you is white. You jus’ come back here, and I’ll teach you how to behave—knockin’ people round!—don’t care if I does hab to go to der watch-house.’ They passed on without noticing him further, only laughing jeeringly—and he continued: ‘You come back here, and I’ll make you laugh. You is just three white nigger cowards, dat’s what you be.’
Another street scene. “Yesterday morning, during a cold, sleety storm, against which I was struggling, with my umbrella, to the post-office, I met a comfortably-dressed Negro leading three others by a rope; the first was a middle-aged man; the second a girl of perhaps twenty; and the last a boy, considerably younger. The arms of all three were secured before them with hand-cuffs, and the rope by which they were led passed from one to another, being made fast at each pair of hand-cuffs. They were thinly clad, the girl especially so, having only an old ragged handkerchief round her neck, over a common calico dress, and another handkerchief twisted around her head. They were dripping wet, and icicles were forming at the time on the awning bars. The boy looked most dolefully, and the girl was turning around with a very angry face, and shouting, ‘O pshaw! Shut up!’
“‘What are they?’ said I, to a white man who had also stopped for a moment to look at them. ‘What’s he going to do with them?’
“‘Come in a canal boat, I reckon; sent down here to be sold. That ar’s a likely girl.’
“Nearly opposite the post-office was another singular group of Negroes. They cons
isted of men and boys, and each carried a coarse white blanket, drawn together at the corners so as to hold some articles; probably extra clothes. They stood in a row, in lounging attitudes, and some of them were quarreling or reproving one another. A villainous-looking white man stood in front of them. Presently, a stout, respectable-looking white man, dressed in black according to the custom, and without any overcoat or umbrella, but with a large gold-headed walking-stick, came out of the door of an office, and without saying a word walked briskly up the street; the Negroes immediately followed in file; the other white man bringing up the rear. They were slaves that had been sent into the town to be hired out as servants or factory hands. The gentleman in black was probably the broker in the business.”
The help. “A Southern lady, of an old and wealthy family,” was complaining about her servants. “If I order a room to be cleaned, or a fire to be made in a distant chamber, I can never be sure I am obeyed unless I go there and see for myself. If I send a girl out to get anything I want for preparing the dinner, she is as likely to forget what is wanted, and not to come back till after the time at which dinner should be ready. The parade of a military company has sometimes entirely prevented me from having any dinner cooked; and when the servants standing in the square looking at the soldiers see my husband coming after them, they only laugh, and run away to the other side, like playful children. And when I reprimand them they only say they don’t mean to do anything wrong, or they won’t do it again, all the time laughing as though it was a joke. They don’t mind it at all. They are just as playful and careless as any willful child; and they never will do any work if you don’t compel them.”