Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison

by Augustus C. Hamlin

XXX.

The inequalities of the earth’s surface are like the rugosities of the human brain: the depths of the one contain the richest and most inexhaustible treasures of mineral wealth, as the wrinkles of the other collect the stores of mental lore. As the surface of the brain becomes less marked and rugged, the strength and scope of the mind vanish, and approach the standard of the lower animals; and likewise, as the elevated lands of the earth shrink in form, and sink into the level of the plain, so the characters of the races who inhabit them lose force and elevation.

Sometimes the minds of men are the reflections of the beauties and sublimities of nature. Sometimes men become degraded, and nature then does not inspire.

XXXI.

The lofty and diversified mountain range, or system of ranges, known as the Appalachian or Alleghany, rises or reappears in the State of New York, midway between the Atlantic coast and the shores of those fresh-water seas, Erie and Ontario. It then stretches down south-westward, with its adjacent spurs, through the great States of Pennsylvania and Virginia; then, dividing, it forms, with its eastern range, the western and northern limit of North and South Carolina and Georgia; and with the western it intersects Tennessee, forming that beautiful basin known among the white men as East Tennessee, but among the traditions of the red men as the Garden of the Manitou—their God. In Northern Alabama, the separated ranges seemingly unite; and passing southward, towards the central portion of the State, the mountain summits gradually contract, and finally sink into the level of the great alluvial plains, which stretch away, without undulation, to the shores of the Gulf. These huge masses of rock, dislocated and elevated like the Vosges and the Hartz Mountains at the close of the carboniferous or devonian period of the earth’s age, contain, with the adjacent and connecting bands,—which are composed of the silurian, primitive, and metamorphic ledges,—most of the accessible mineral wealth of the republic. And the collective beds of iron, coal, marble, zinc, copper, and gold are unsurpassed in similar extent and richness by the mines of any country of the known world, with the exception of those wonderful deposits of ores and minerals among the unexplored and almost inaccessible recesses and plateaus of the Sierra Nevada or the Andes.

With the exception of the northern extremity of this mountain group, these mines of natural wealth may be said to have been unexplored. Below the rich and populous State of Pennsylvania, the hum of human industry ceases; for we then pass into the paralyzing shadow of Slavery. This Slavery forbade the development of the earth’s treasures, as well as the enlightenment of the minds of the poor and ignorant whites. The forges of Vulcan would have hammered out and broken into fragments the chains of that bondage which not only oppressed the fettered blacks, but debased, with its corroding influence, the competing labor of the white man.

The slaveholders concealed this immense natural wealth from the eyes of science from motives of policy; and rather than incur the hazard of revolution, by educating the masses of their own people, they preferred to neglect their natural advantages, and to send to distant and even foreign lands the products of their fields and their system, to be worked up into the marvellous fabrics of human ingenuity and skill. This same State of Virginia, which is the real gateway to the empires of the West, and which is not surpassed in natural physical advantages by any equal extent of territory on the globe, is the most ignorant of all of the States of the republic. Ninety thousand of its native-born free people, over twenty years of age, before the war could not read nor write; whilst sterile and stormy Maine, with her cold lands and colder skies, contained but two thousand of the same class, out of a population more than half as great. And New England, with a population of almost three times as great as the free people of Virginia, is ashamed by the number of seven thousand illiterate natives past the age of twenty. Who will wonder at the display of barbarity and audacity when the statistics of education and ignorance are exhibited? “Education and liberty,” says Mirabeau, “are the bases of all social harmony and all human prosperity.”

Which can civilization curse the most, London or Amsterdam? the Dutch who introduced Slavery, or the English who thought Virginia a good place to “colonize aristocratic stupidity,” and who sent colonists, who were, according to the historian, “fitter to breed a riot than to found a colony.” The condition of the present day shows how rigidly the first instructions have been observed and enforced. “Thank God,” writes one of its early governors to the English Privy Council, “thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have any these hundred years! for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”

XXXII.

And so these mines, and fields, and forests, remain to the present day, unsurveyed, unexplored and unknown, save to a few wanderers of science.