They were somewhere off the North Carolina shore, which, when the daylight dawned, they could distinctly see, with its ominous line of breakers and inhospitable perilous coast. The men had continued rowing all night, and as the summer sun rose flaming over their heads, the task of pulling the boat became dreadfully severe; still they followed the coast, Mr. C—— looking out for any opening, creek, or small inlet, that might give them a chance of landing in safety. The other boat rowed on at some little distance from them.
All the morning, and through the tremendous heat of the middle day, they toiled on without a mouthful of food—without a drop of water. At length, towards the afternoon, the men at the oars said they were utterly exhausted and could row no longer, and that Mr. C—— must steer the boat ashore. With wonderful power of command, he prevailed on them to continue their afflicting labour. The terrible blazing sun pouring on all their unsheltered heads had almost annihilated them; but still there lay between them and the land those fearful foaming ridges, and the women and children, if not the men themselves, seemed doomed to inevitable death in the attempt to surmount them. Suddenly they perceived that the boat that had kept them company was about to adventure itself in the perilous experiment of landing. Mr. C—— kept his boat's head steady, the men rested on their oars, and watched the result of the fearful risk they were themselves about to run. They saw the boat enter the breakers—they saw her whirled round and capsized, and then they watched, slowly emerging and dragging themselves out of the foaming sea, some, and only some, of the people that they knew the boat contained. Mr. C——, fortified with this terrible illustration of the peril that awaited them, again besought them to row yet for a little while further along the coast, in search of some possible place to take the boat safely to the beach, promising at sunset to give up the search; and again the poor men resumed their toil, but the line of leaping breakers stretched along the coast as far as eye could see, and at length the men declared they could labour no longer, and insisted that Mr. C—— should steer them to shore. He then said that he would do so, but they must take some rest before encountering the peril which awaited them, and for which they might require whatever remaining strength they could command. He made the men leave the oars and lie down to sleep for a short time, and then, giving the helm to one of them, did the same himself. When they were thus a little refreshed with this short rest, he prepared to take the boat into the breakers.
He laid Mrs. N——'s baby on her breast, and wrapped a shawl round and round her body so as to secure the child to it, and said, in the event of the boat capsizing, he would endeavour to save her and her child. Mrs. F—— and her boy he gave in charge to one of the sailors, and the coloured woman who was with her to the other; and they promised solemnly, in case of misadventure to the boat, to do their best to save these helpless creatures; and so they turned, as the sun was going down, the bows of the boat to the terrible shore. They rose two of the breakers safely, but then the oar of one of the men was struck from his hand, and in an instant the boat whirled round and turned over. Mr. C—— instantly struck out to seize Mrs. N——, but she had sunk, and though he dived twice he could not see her; at last, he felt her hair floating loose with his foot, and seizing hold of it, grasped her securely and swam with her to shore. While in the act of doing so, he saw the man who had promised to save the coloured woman making alone for the beach; and even then, in that extremity, he had power of command enough left to drive the fellow back to seek her, which he did, and brought her safe to land. The other man kept his word of taking care of Mrs. F——, and the latter never released her grasp of her child's wrist, which bore the mark of her agony for weeks after their escape. They reached the sands, and Mrs. N——'s shawl having been unwound, her child was found laughing on her bosom. But hardly had they had time to thank God for their deliverance when Mr. C—— fell fainting on the beach; and Mrs. F——, who told me this, said that for one dreadful moment they thought that the preserver of all their lives had lost his own in the terrible exertion and anxiety that he had undergone. He revived, however, and crawling a little further up the beach, they burrowed for warmth and shelter as well as they could in the sand, and lay there till the next morning, when they sought and found succour.
You cannot imagine, my dear E——, how strikingly throughout this whole narrative the extraordinary power of Mr. C——'s character makes itself felt,—the immediate obedience that he obtained from women whose terror might have made them unmanageable, and men whose selfishness might have defied his control; the wise though painful firmness, which enabled him to order the boat away from the side of the perishing vessel, in spite of the pity that he felt for the many, in attempting to succour whom he could only have jeopardized the few whom he was bound to save; the wonderful influence he exercised over the poor oarsmen, whose long protracted labour postponed to the last possible moment the terrible risk of their landing. The firmness, courage, humanity, wisdom, and presence of mind, of all his preparations for their final tremendous risk, and the authority which he was able to exercise while struggling in the foaming water for his own life and that of the woman and child he was saving, over the man who was proving false to a similar sacred charge,—all these admirable traits are most miserably transmitted to you by my imperfect account; and when I assure you that his own narrative, full as it necessarily was of the details of his own heroism, was as simple, modest, and unpretending, as it was interesting and touching, I am sure you will agree with me that he must be a very rare man. When I spoke with enthusiasm to his old father of his son's noble conduct, and asked him if he was not proud of it, his sole reply was,—'I am glad, madam, my son was not selfish.'
Now, E——, I have often spoken with you and written to you of the disastrous effect of slavery upon the character of the white men implicated in it; many, among themselves, feel and acknowledge it to the fullest extent, and no one more than myself can deplore that any human being I love should be subjected to such baneful influences; but the devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of peremptory command over their fellow men, and under the constant apprehension of danger, and awful necessity of immediate readiness to meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of supreme peril such as this man passed through, saving by their exercise himself and all committed to his charge. I know that the southern men are apt to deny the fact that they do live under an habitual sense of danger; but a slave population, coerced into obedience, though unarmed and half fed, is a threatening source of constant insecurity, and every southern woman to whom I have spoken on the subject, has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves. Happy are such of them as have protectors like J—— C——. Such men will best avoid and best encounter the perils that may assail them from the abject subject, human element, in the control of which their noble faculties are sadly and unworthily employed.
Wednesday, 17th April.—I rode to-day after breakfast, to Mrs. D——'s, another of my neighbours, who lives full twelve miles off. During the last two miles of my expedition, I had the white sand hillocks and blue line of the Atlantic in view. The house at which I called was a tumble-down barrack of a dwelling in the woods, with a sort of poverty-stricken pretentious air about it, like sundry 'proud planters' dwellings that I have seen. I was received by the sons as well as the lady of the house, and could not but admire the lordly rather than manly indifference, with which these young gentlemen, in gay guard chains and fine attire, played the gallants to me, while filthy, bare-footed half naked negro women brought in refreshments, and stood all the while fanning the cake, and sweetmeats, and their young masters, as if they had been all the same sort of stuff. I felt ashamed for the lads. The conversation turned upon Dr. H——'s trial; for there has been a trial as a matter of form, and an acquittal as a matter of course; and the gentlemen said, upon my expressing some surprise at the latter event, that there could not be found in all Georgia a jury who would convict him, which says but little for the moral sense of 'all Georgia.' From this most painful subject we fell into the Brunswick canal, and thereafter I took my leave and rode home. I met my babies in the wood-wagon, and took S—— up before me, and gave her a good gallop home. Having reached the house with the appetite of a twenty-four miles' ride, I found no preparation for dinner, and not so much as a boiled potato to eat, and the sole reply to my famished and disconsolate exclamations was—'Being that you order none, missis, I not know.' I had forgotten to order my dinner, and my slaves, unauthorised, had not ventured to prepare any. Wouldn't a Yankee have said, 'Wal now, you went off so uncommon quick, I kinder guessed you forgot all about dinner,' and have had it all ready for me? But my slaves durst not, and so I fasted till some tea could be got for me.
This was the last letter I wrote from the plantation, and I never returned there, nor ever saw again any of the poor people among whom I lived during this winter, but Jack, once, under sad circumstances. The poor lad's health failed so completely, that his owners humanely brought him to the north, to try what benefit he might derive from the change; but this was before the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill, when touching the soil of the northern states, a slave became free; and such was the apprehension felt lest Jack should be enlightened as to this fact by some philanthropic abolitionist, that he was kept shut up in a high upper room of a large empty house, where even I was not allowed to visit him. I heard at length of his being in Philadelphia; and upon my distinct statement that I considered freeing their slaves the business of the Messrs. —— themselves, and not mine, I was at length permitted to see him. Poor fellow! coming to the north did not prove to him the delight his eager desire had so often anticipated from it; nor under such circumstances is it perhaps much to be wondered at that he benefited but little by the change,—he died not long after.
I once heard a conversation between Mr. O—— and Mr. K——, the two overseers of the plantation on which I was living, upon the question of taking slaves, servants, necessary attendants, into the northern states; Mr. O—— urged the danger of their being 'got hold of,' i.e., set free by the abolitionists, to which Mr. K—— very pertinently replied, 'Oh, stuff and nonsense, I take care when my wife goes north with the children, to send Lucy with her; her children are down here, and I defy all the abolitionists in creation to get her to stay north.' Mr. K—— was an extremely wise man.