“Yes, Mr. Charlton. Inquire for John Jacobs. Keep a bright lookout for me, and you sha’n’t be the loser. Will five dollars pay you?”
Charlton wavered between the temptation to clutch more at the moment, and the prospect of making his new client available in other ways. At length taking the money he replied, “I will make it do for the present. Good morning.”
CHAPTER V.
A RETROSPECT.
“Any slave refusing obedience to any command may be flogged till he submits or dies. Not by occasional abuses alone, but by the universal law of the Southern Confederacy, the existing system of slavery violates all the moral laws of Christianity.”—Rev. Newman Hall.
Before removing Peculiar from the closet which at Charlton’s bidding he has entered, we must go back to the time when he was a slave, and amplify and illustrate certain parts of his abridged narrative. His life, up to the period when he comes upon our little stage, divides itself into three eras, all marked by their separate moral experiences. In the first, he felt the slave’s crowning curse,—the absence of that sense of personal responsibility which freedom alone can give; and he fell into the demoralization which is the inherent consequence of the slave’s condition. In the second era, he encountered his mother, and then the frozen fountain of his affections was unsealed and melted. In the third, he met Corinna, and for the first time looked on life with the eyes of belief.
It will seem idle to many advanced minds in this nineteenth century to use words to show the wrong of slavery. Why not as well spend breath in denouncing burglary or murder? But slavery is still a power in the world. We are daily told it is the proper status for the colored man in this country; that he ought to covet slavery as much as a white man ought to covet freedom. Besides, since Peek has confessed himself at one time of his life a liar, we must show why he ought logically to have been one.
To blame a slave for lying and stealing, is about as fair as it would be to blame a man for using strategy in escaping from an assassin. For the slaveholder, if not the assassin of the slave’s life, is the assassin of his liberty, his manhood, his moral dignity.
Mr. Pugh of Ohio, Vallandigham’s associate on the gubernatorial ticket for 1863, presents his thesis thus: “When the slaves are fit for freedom, they will be free.”
The profundity of this oracular proposition is only equalled in the remark of the careful grandmother, who declared she would never let a boy go into the water till he knew how to swim.
“When the slaves are fit!” As if the road were clear for them to achieve their fitness! Why, the slave is not only robbed of his labor, but of his very chances as a thinking being. Yes, with a charming consistency, the slavery barons, the Hammonds and the Davises, while they tell us the negro is unfitted for mental cultivation, institute the severest penal laws against all attempts to teach the slave to read!