Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

“You are quite mistaken, Rhoda, as to what they meant, or, rather, as to the way in which they meant it. When this nation was created North and South joined in sworn faith to a written contract. That contract recognized the rights of the south in its peculiar, its necessary, institution, and provided for their safeguarding. And now the North is trying to break that sworn faith, to force us out of our constitutional rights. It is not only our property but our honor that is at stake, and we should be craven indeed if we did not resent this combination of despotism and insult! Preston Brooks was right when he said the other day that if Frémont is elected the people of the South ought to march to Washington and seize the archives and the treasury of the government!”

She was leaning eagerly forward, her eyes shining, her lips parted, her face, paled by her excitement, vivid with the feeling that had swept her up into the regions where soul and body breathe the elixir of supreme conviction. But when she spoke, breaking in quickly upon his first pause, it was not only the fulness of her belief that thrilled in her low, tense tones. Their lower notes were sweet with the love that burned in her heart.

“Oh, Jeff, can’t you see— Oh, I wish I could make you see that there can be no rights that are founded on wrong.” She paused a moment, her voice on a suspended accent, as she gathered her thoughts together. Delavan’s eyes devoured the fair picture that she made and his heart leaped in response to those sweet notes in her voice. His mind was full of the ideas he had just uttered, tense with the conviction of their truth, and his nerves were thrilling with the emotions they had bred. And this dear girl, leaning toward him with spirit-lit face, as tense with her convictions as he with his, was the embodiment of all that northern feeling and activity which he so much resented, against which he protested with all his force as a base invasion of Southern rights.

But, even as his body throbbed with love and admiration for her fairness and sweetness, his spirit yearned toward the loftiness of hers. Ah, they were akin, they were mates, their spirits, even though they were opposed! He recognized in her that same fervency of faith, that same power of devotion to the mind’s ideal, that were bone and sinew of his own temperament. And they were on opposing sides of this vital question—so intensely vital, he felt, to him, to his section, to the nation, to the whole of civilization! If only they were joined in their ideals!

“You see, Jeff, when they signed the Constitution, they hadn’t come to realize yet how wrong slavery is. Men grow in knowledge of right and wrong, and we in the North have grown faster on this question than you have, because we haven’t had the comfort and the luxury and the wealth produced by that awful wrong to blind and hinder us. Our eyes have been opened—God has opened them for us, and we see slavery for what it is—a hideous, cruel, horrible thing that keeps human beings down and makes beasts of them, brutalizes the souls God made in his image!”

She clasped her hands and began to extend her arms beseechingly toward her listener. Her pink sleeves fell back a little and his heart swelled with longing to see the warm roundness of those arms reaching out to him in love and surrender. “Oh, Jeff, it is so wicked, so evil,” she began. “I wish I could make you see—” her voice broke, she drew back her arms and dropped her face into her hands, then sprang to her feet. “And—and—oh, Jeff—” her voice was thrilling with love, but it trembled upon sobs and she rushed to the door. “It is keeping us apart!” she cried, and the door closed behind her.

CHAPTER XIII

Charlotte ran upstairs from the veranda and dashed into her sister’s room. “Do look out, Rhoda,” she called. “It’s that crazy peddler, Chad Wallace. He’s asking father if he can keep his wagon in our barn to-night. Now there’ll be some fun this evening—he’s so comical, with his songs and dances!”

Rhoda moved to the window and saw a little, wiry-looking man talking with Dr. Ware beside the east gate. A short, sparse growth of graying whiskers covered his face to the middle of his cheeks, and pale-colored hair curled around his neck below his shabby, bell-crowned hat. His wagon, with side curtains rolled up displaying boxes piled inside, was at the hitching post.

“He looks just the same as ever, doesn’t he,” she said calmly, as they stood beside the window with their arms about each other’s waists. But her heart was beating faster, for she knew what his coming meant. She knew that in his dingy old wagon he was accustomed to make long trips on the Kentucky side of the river, ostensibly selling his wares in villages and at farms, but picking up, whenever opportunity offered, some fugitive slave and concealing him in a vacant space in the center, around which the boxes and packages were carefully arranged. Then he would cross the river at the nearest ferry and put the runaway into the charge of an Underground “station.” Or, sometimes, he would remain for months at a time in the neighborhood of one or another of the Underground routes through Ohio, apparently selling his stock of notions, but really conveying the fleeing slaves from one station to another.