Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

  Edward Bligh entered this store, intending that the purchase of a pound of coffee should lead the way to conversation either with the master of it, or his customers; and to facilitate this he began by examining some “negro shoes,” as they are called, which lay piled up half-way to the ceiling on one side of the magazine.

  “Famous good shoes these, sir,” said he to the only man who had not a cigar in his mouth, and whom he rightly judged to be the master, though he was earnestly occupied in reading a newspaper; “capital make — what may be the damage, sir, of half-a-dozen of them?”

  “That’s according, I expect,” replied Mr. Monroe Vandumper without raising his eyes from the paper.

  “Any particular news, sir, to-day?” resumed Edward, still continuing his examination of the negro-shoes.

  “Umph!” responded Mr. Vandumper; “what part of the country may you be from? — Backwoods away, I guess?”

  “Just so, sir,” replied Edward good-humouredly; “and it’s quite a treat to come to Natchez and hear a little how the world goes. They’re beginning to get feverish at New Orleans, I hear; but I hope you’ve nothing of the sort here as yet?”

  “Do you want them shoes?” was the only answer vouchsafed to this inquiry by Mr. Monroe Vandumper; but Edward was too deeply interested in his object to be easily discouraged, and practising a little artifice which upon any less occasion he would have scorned, he took a handful of silver and copper money from his pocket, saying, “We back-woodsmen, you know, sir, sometimes want more than we have dollars to pay for; and so I must see all I can, and choose for the best at last. ’Tis not exactly for myself I was inquiring about the shoes; but a neighbour of mine owns slaves, and it is about them that I was asking. And, now I think of it, he told me to inquire in the town here, if there has been any sale lately of young plantation blacks. He wants a girl that can wash and iron, and he would not stand for price. You have not seen any advertisement that you think might suit, — have you, sir?”

  “That’s considerable more than I can pretend to say. I see over many to remember much of any of ’em. But if you’re looking after that commodity, you’d best step over the way by the market yonder, and you’ll see advertisements stuck up everlasting there.”

  “Then that’s jest what I’ll do, sir; but first I’ll trouble you to sell me a pound of coffee.”

  There was something in the sweet voice and gentle bearing of Edward that might have disarmed the churlishness of Cerberus; and its influence was felt not only by Mr. Monroe Vandumper himself, who actually laid aside his newspaper and set about weighing the coffee, but also by the elegant youth who was swinging his legs, one on each side the counter, and who having just finished his cigar, thus bespoke him:

  “So you’re after finding a smart smut — are you, my lad? Confound them all, say I! A fine rumpus they’ve been making at Oglevie’s, down at the factory by the river, near Orlines. Why, if they haven’t had the unbelievable impudence to be found with three tracts and a newspaper hid under one of the presses, may I never taste another cigar! — and two of the black devils absconded.”

  “Is that lately, sir?” said Edward.

  “Five days ago, by G — d!” replied the young man, bringing his off-leg over the counter, and letting both hang down close to Edward’s arm, “only Monday last: and when the tracts were found, and stuck up burning upon the end of a cane, the whole gang set up such a howl that the foreman was right-down scared. The head clerk is a brother of my own, and he come up in a steamer yesterday to look at a lot of infernal trash of the same sort that was picked up in some cotton-grounds hereabouts. They hope to trace the white rascals they come from; and it’s determined on all sides that they shall be tarred and burnt to death in the nearest market-place, let them be found where they may.”

  “That will be sport at any rate!” observed the gentleman who was ensconced in the tub. “I would not mind having to flog a nigger or two out of their work for a week, to have the glory of seeing a saint burnt for it.”

  “I expect not, squire,” said the balancing occupant of the stool: “it would pay any of us well for the loss of a dozen lazy black devils for a week, such a sight as that; and, what’s more, we must contrive to have it soon, or I calculate worse will follow. I’m positive certain that some of my black varment are being learned to read; and if that spreads, we’ll have an insurrection and be murdered in our beds before we’re a year older, as sure as the sun’s in heaven.”

  “Massa want tree pound of baccy,” said a fine-looking negro lad, approaching the receipt of custom with money for the purchase on his extended palm.

  “You be d — d!” cried the young man on the counter, raising one of his feet as he spoke, and giving a sharp kick to the boy’s hand, the money, which consisted of some copper and one or two small silver coins, was scattered far and wide on the floor.

  Every white man in the store; save Edward, burst into a shout of laughter.

  The young negro was in an agony of terror, and threw himself on the ground to recover the money; but his persecutor sprang from the counter, and assiduously collecting with his feet all the dust and rubbish on the floor to cover the coins, and occasionally kicking aside the hands of the boy as he sought to recover them, produced such a continuation of noisy merriment from the lookers-on, that the loungers outside the store were induced to enter, in order to inquire its cause.

  No sooner was the jest made known, than the clamour, kickings, and buffetings became general; while the poor victim, suffering alike from present pain and the dread of future punishment, groaned aloud as his tormenters rolled him from one to the other beneath their feet. Drops of agony stood on Edward’s brow. Could he for one moment have possessed a giant’s strength, he would willingly have consented to die the next, might he but have used it to crush the wretches whose wanton, cowardly barbarity he was thus forced to witness. He turned to the door for air, and a moment’s reflection closed his idle rage, while it strengthened a thousand-fold the steadfast purpose of his heart.

  “You’ve got fine fun there, I expect — there’s no denying that,” said Mr. Vandumper, recovering at length from his fit of immoderate laughter; “but I’ll be burnt if I don’t make you pay for the baccy yourselves; so quit, and let the varment get up and do his errand.”

  The weather was warm, and the exercise they were engaged in violent, so that Mr. Vandumper’s remonstrance was seconded by fatigue, and after one final kick from each, the sport ended, and the negro-boy was suffered to search among the dust for the money he had lost. He recovered it all except one small silver coin of the value of six cents. Having sought for this in vain for several minutes, he rose to his feet as if inspired by a sudden ray of hope, and with a look of innocent entreaty that might have moved a savage, said, “You give me the baccy, massa, for this?” holding out the recovered money as he spoke.

  Mr. Monroe Vandumper received the money and counted it.

  “Now, isn’t he an impudent varment?” he exclaimed, turning to the weary jesters, who were wiping their brows after the sport. “Isn’t he a proper nigger? — You black dirt you! d’ye think I’ll trust such a one as you a picciune?”

  Exhausted as they were, this sally produced another hearty laugh from the bystanders; while Edward, whose eyes were fixed upon the boy, saw him visibly tremble, and such an expression of terror took possession of his young features, that, thoughtless of the observations it might provoke, he supplied the piece of money that was wanting, saying, “Off with you, boy, with your baccy; and then I shall get my coffee, you see.”

  A glance of mingled surprise and rapture shot from the large eyes of the boy as he fixed them for a moment on the face of his benefactor; but Edward had the prudence to take no farther notice of him.

  Mr. Vandumper whistled a bar or two of Yankee Doodle without speaking, weighed the three pounds of tobacco, tied it up, again counted the money that had been laid upon the counter, and then pushing the parcel to the young slave, dismissed him with saying, �
�Go and be flogged for wasting your master’s time, you black imp!”

  The boy gave one more speaking glance at Edward and departed. As he reached the door, the gentleman who was perched aloft close to it, and who had taken no farther part in the scene that had just passed than cheering the actors in it by shouts of laughter, stooping forward his head as the boy passed under him, contrived accurately to spit upon him as he went out. Once mere the chamber rang with laughter; and then Edward received his pound of coffee and left the shop.

  CHAPTER XV.

  IN pursuance of the advice he had received, Edward Bligh proceeded to the market-place of Natchez; and there in truth he found, stuck conspicuously upon every point of vantage, unnumbered advertisements of the sale of negroes, singly, in couples, in families, and in gangs. But it appeared to him that there was not one which could include Phebe.

  While earnestly occupied in this examination he was addressed by a voice quite unknown to him.

  “You’re looking for a bargain, are ye? — Yet somehow I calculate that you have no great notion neither about furnishing yourself with negroes. Maybe, mister, you are one of them what thinks slavery an abomination? Such folks are very plentiful, I hear, up the country now-a-days.”

  Edward turned to look at the person who spoke, and instantly recognised the hateful countenance of the man who from his lofty station in Vandumper’s store had offered the last parting insult to the poor negro-boy.

  A feeling of antipathy induced Bligh to turn away without answering; but immediately recollecting the purpose for which he was, at Natchez, he stepped back, after looking at an advertisement a few feet distant, and replied civilly, —

  “It certainly is not on my own account, sir, that I am looking out. — My father owned many slaves, but he died a bankrupt, and I am too poor to own one.”

  The stranger eyed him with evident curiosity.

  “You are a stranger in Natchez, I think?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In what State was your father’s plantation?”

  “My father’s farm was in Kentucky.”

  “Kentucky? — They don’t know overmuch about managing niggers in Kentucky. — You are a farmer’s son, are you? — and your father died a bankrupt, did he? That must be inconvenient enough, no doubt. — And so you do a little in the agent way like, is that it?”

  “No, sir; the commission was quite accidental, because I was just coming to Natchez. My business now is keeping a day-school.”

  “A school? — I thought you told us you come from the back-woods?”

  “So I do, sir, though from no great distance; and there are many of the settlers round about who are glad to pay a few dollars to have their children kept out of mischief and taught to read.”

  “Have you any negro-schools in Kentucky, my lad?”

  “I believe not, sir.”

  “But some of the niggers are uncommon knowing there, I am told. Did your father find it so with his?”

  “I think not, sir. They most of them appeared profoundly ignorant.”

  “And first-rate beastly stupid too, I take it. But maybe that’s not your notion concerning them? Maybe you expect they might be made into human creturs contrary to natur, if they had but a young saint or two to help ’em?” There was something in the man’s manner from the first which led Edward to suspect that he had some sinister object in addressing him; and these last words not only confirmed this idea, but indicated plainly enough what the object was which the questioner had in view. This man had in truth, while seated aloft in the store, narrowly watched the speaking countenance of Bligh during the savage scene that passed there; and when at length he saw one whose dress was hardly above that of a labourer give money to extricate the negro-boy from his embarrassment, very little doubt remained on his mind that the pale but strikingly handsome young man who called himself a back-woodsman was neither more nor less than one of those who dared to enter a land of slavery with the gospel in his hand. That many such had left behind them, as they quietly passed through that land, some traces of knowledge and of truth concerning both this world and that which is to come, was a fact of which Louisianians, in common with the inhabitants of all other slave-holding States, had recently become very painfully aware.

  When first this danger threatened, the legislatures of most of these States contented themselves by framing laws, brief, peremptory, and severe, against all such as should be found engaged in teaching slaves the unlawful arts of reading and writing. But this slow, difficult, and, under these laws, dangerous process, was not the only one resorted to by the bold men who ventured to grapple with the slaveholders for the souls of their victims, though they had no power to redeem their bodies.

  The sort of phrenetic rage which the discovery of this plot, as it was called, excited among the slave-holders, is now pretty generally known to the world by the acts to which it has led, and might really lead one to believe that the religious creed of these persons taught them to expect that their rights over the negro race were not to be forfeited like other mortal tenures by death, but would hold good to all eternity in the life to come, provided that no emancipation was obtained there for their slaves by the interference of meddling Christians while on earth.

  Not very long before the period of which I write, some of the wealthiest planters in the neighborhood of New Orleans met together in secret conclave to consult on the means most likely to check the growing evil. Some among them are said to have gone the length of proposing that State laws should be enacted, making the being caught in the fact of giving religious instruction to a slave a capital offence, in all cases to be punishable by death. But it was suggested that American citizens of the free States might possibly object to such power being given to any jurisdiction, for offences not recognised by the national law, over white men born in the Union, and under the protection of its stars and its stripes.

  “What then was to be done? Were the landholders and merchants of the wealthiest part of the Union to have their dearest interests continually endangered by illegal efforts to make their slaves Christians? The canting, busy, mischief-making English, whose African association was for ever at work to stir up a ruinous strife in a prosperous and rival country, might pretend to be better and more philanthropic than their transatlantic offspring; but let some newly-invented process be set in action that should cause the horse, the ox, and the ass of Briton to turn and reason with his master for making him toil, what would the fierce Islanders say then? — Would they not rise and tear to atoms the agents in such a plot?”

  Such were the reasonings, it is said, upon which many among the influential part of the slave-holding population of the United States acted, when it was tacitly resolved amongst them not to interfere whenever individual vengeance should be taken upon those suspected of holding religious intercourse with slaves, let that vengeance go what lengths it might.

  The knowledge and belief that such a resolution had been secretly entered into by many possessing great power and influence was gradually gaining ground, producing consequences such as might easily have been predicted, and such in fact as it was intended they should produce.

  The appetite for this species of chartered vengeance very naturally increased by what it fed on, and very many petty planters besides Mr. Giles Hogstown, who had now fixed himself on Edward Bligh, felt as much gratification in getting scent of a missionary, or tracking a Christian traveller, as a bloodhound shows when he comes upon the trace of his prey.

  Though by no means fully aware of the extent to which this system of licensed outrage was carried, Edward knew enough of it to feel certain that this man’s questions boded him no good; but as in this case no present danger threatened either Lucy or any of his sable flock, his spirit rose to meet and baffle it, and to Hogstown’s allusion to “saints” he replied with a smile, and looking him full in the face —

  “But where are the young saints to come from, sir? — I don’t fancy we can expect any more saints on earth jest at pre
sent.”

  “You hail from Kentucky, my lad, don’t you?” replied Hogstown, twisting the quid in his mouth, and at the same time squirting forth its juice with an expressive jerk.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Edward, preserving his steady unembarrassed air;” and a very fine country it is. — Do you happen to know it, sir?”

  “I know enough of it to say that no whey-faced canting vagabonds had ought to come therefrom. They most generally rises very unaccountable fine fellows there, who are most times up to a thing or two; but it’s likely enough that, with all their gouging and fun, they may learn something new if they send out some strolling scouts Natchez way. We arn’t to be beat, nor scared, nor bamboozled by any that stands between earth and heaven, — mind that, my lad.”

  So saying, he turned down a street at the corner of which they were standing, leaving Edward considerably at a loss to comprehend the meaning of his parting address.

  He suspected, indeed that he was threatened, but he knew not with what; and more determined than ever to separate himself from Lucy, he crossed the market to a store that exhibited in its window ready-made caps, hats, and sundry garments for children.

  “Do you happen to want a very handy young woman for needlework?” said he as he entered, and almost before he had seen the face of the person he addressed.

  This was an extremely beautiful young woman who stood behind the counter, and whose delicate complexion had a slight shade of that peculiar tinge which marks the quadroon in Louisiana, but which would have gained her in Europe the reputation of being the most beautiful brunette in the world.