"Was your master kind to you?"
"Yes, sir; but he sold my husband and children down South."
The secret of her sadness was out.
"Where are you going? or where do you expect to go?"
"I don't know, sir, and I don't care where I go."
The conversation ran on for some minutes. She manifested no animation, and did not once raise her eyes, but kept them fixed on vacancy. Husband and children sold, gone forever,—there was nothing in life to charm her. Even the prospect of freedom, with its undefined joys and pleasures, its soul-stirring expectations, raising the hopes of those around her, moved her not.
Life was a blank. She had lived in her master's family, and was intelligent. She was the daughter of her master. She was high-toned in her feelings. The dancing and shouting of those around her were distasteful. It was to her more barbaric than Christian. She was alone among them. She felt her degradation. Freedom could not give her a birthright among the free. The daughter of her master! It was gall and wormwood; and he, her father, had sold her husband and his grandchildren!
I had read of such things. But one needs to come in contact with slavery, to feel how utterly loathsome and hateful it is. There was the broken-hearted victim, so bruised that not freedom itself, neither the ecstasy of those around her, could awaken an emotion of joy. Hour after hour the festivities went on, but there she sat upon the step, looking down the desolate years gone by, or into a dreamless, hopeless future.
It was late at night before the dancers ceased, and then they stopped, not because of a surfeit of joy, but because the time had come for silence in the camp. It was their first Sabbath of freedom, and like the great king of Israel, upon the recovery of the ark of God, they danced before the Lord with all their might.
We had a hard, dusty ride from the encampment at Mongohick to the Pamunkey. It was glorious, however, in the early morning to sweep along the winding forest-road, with the head-quarters' flag in advance. Wherever its silken folds were unfurled, there the two commanders might be found,—General Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, and General Grant, the commander of all the forces of the Union in the field. We passed the long line of troops, crossed the Pamunkey upon a pontoon bridge, rode a mile or two across the verdant intervale, and halted beneath the oaks, magnolias, and buttonwoods of an old Virginia mansion. The edifice was reared a century ago. It was of wood, stately and substantial. How luxurious the surrounding shade; the smooth lawn, the rolled pathways bordered by box, with moss-roses, honeysuckle, and jessamines scenting the air, and the daisies dotting the greensward! The sweep of open land,—viewing it from the wide portico; the long reach of cultivated grounds; acres of wheat rolling in the breeze, like waves of the ocean; meadow-lands, smooth and fair; distant groves and woodlands,—how magnificent! It was an old estate, inherited by successive generations,—by those whose pride it had been to keep the paternal acres in the family name. But the sons had all gone. A daughter was the last heir. She gave her hand, and heart, and the old homestead,—sheep, horses, a great stock of bovines, and a hundred negroes or more,—to her husband. The family name became extinct, and the homestead of seven or eight generations passed into the hands of one bearing another name.