By the order of Dr. Holland, the American chargé, the town was bombarded by Commodore Ingraham, of the United States squadron, and the embryo government disappeared from the stage forever.
While travelling on this quest he wrote and published a small work (originally designed for pamphlet form) on the condition of the colored race in America. This being published without proper revision, he having left it to another’s superintendence,—for at this time he was prosecuting his invention of the inclined plane, and also the Central American project,—on its appearance it was nearly dashed to pieces in the storm it encountered. None criticised it so severely as himself; while some of his friends were disposed to look favorably upon it, as the errors it contained could not be disguised, and the author was known to be aware of them. One severe criticism, more of himself, it appeared, than the book, he seemed to have regarded as “the unkindest cut of all”—that of Mr. Oliver Johnson, then editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman. To add to the list of disasters, some person sent a copy to England to Mr. Armisted, author of the “Negro’s Friend.”
He says, in speaking of Mr. Johnson’s criticism of himself, “I was poor when I wrote, weary and hungry. This my friend Johnson did not know, else he would not so severely have criticised me. He thought I wrote as an author, to be seen and known of men. I wrote not as an author, but as I travelled about from place to place.
Sometimes I sat, sometimes I stood,
Writing when and where I could,
A little here, a little there;
’Twas here, and there, and everywhere.
I wrote to obtain subsistence. I had travelled and speculated until I found myself out of means.”
The book was stopped by him in the midst of the first edition of one thousand.
He always likened himself, concerning that literary undertaking, to Gumpton Cute, a character in the play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who, “being on a filibustering expedition, got a little short of change.” Thus failing in all that he had designed, with the most laudable motives in view, and succeeding in that with which he neither desired nor could be satisfied—making a poor book. While he good-humoredly admits the fallacy of his moves, yet his friends, mindful of the long, wearisome months of toil and anxiety, and of high hopes wrecked, regret them, as making a void useless and unnatural in his life’s history, and consider it an episode illegitimate in his rôle.