We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on “the underground railway,” and went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent. When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied—
“Kase it paid. Dere’s nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las’ time I went Norf wid massa I made ’nuff out of him to buy myself free twice’t over.”
Doubtless there were many instances of “pampered and petted” household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only
devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them—as happened on an average once at least in a life—were all to a man quite ready to forsake “ole massa” and “dear ole missus,” and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his freedom to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity—and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift!
I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not like slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, “the sum of all crimes.” In which summation he showed himself indeed a “sumner,” as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was an Abolitionist. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves.
For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned “slä-äves,” detest the name of “South,” and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free. I lived to see the roof of the “gentlemanly planter,” who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke—
“And death-shots flying thick and fast,”
while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at once blatant “nigger-worshippers,” abundant in proof that they had always had “an indescribable horror of slavery”—it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and cautiously—“paw by paw into the water”—these dough faces became hard-baked Abolitionists, far surpassing us of the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted against Grant and reviled him become his most intimate friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably—very far—than do even the English. However, in the case of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the head of any man to write a Dictionnaire des Girouettes in America. These late converts had never known what it was to be Abolitionists while it was “unfashionable,” and have, as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart—as I had a thousand times during many years—all for believing the tremendous and plain truth that slavery was a thousand times wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put together. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or Quaker, to be an Abolitionist in Philadelphia from 1848 until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they had been Chinese—“and d---d bad Chinese at that,” as a
friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for man’s relations with poor humanity.
My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few exceptions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to edit a “selected” magazine, he went to and fro for many voyages to Haïti, where, singular as it may seem, his experiences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties.