“‘I came to ask, please ma’am, if I might have another husband.’
“Just at this crisis the oracle entered, who, having authority by a few spoken words, to join together those whom no man may put asunder, these poor people simply imagine him gifted with equal power to annul the contract with a breath of his mouth.
“I was heartily amused to find that this woman was really no widow, as I had supposed, but merely from caprice, or some reason satisfactory to herself, no doubt, took it into her head to drop her present spouse and look out for another. The matter was referred to the ‘Quarterly Conference,’ where an amusing scene occurred, which resulted in the discomfiture of the disconsolate petitioner, who returned to her home rather crest-fallen.
“These Quarterly Conference debates, for flights of oratory, and superlativeness of diction, beggar all description. Be it understood, that negroes, as a class, have more ‘business’ to attend to than any other people—that is, provided they can thereby get a chance to ‘speak ’fore white folks.’ To make a speech is glory enough for Sambo, if he happen to have the ‘gift of gab;’ and to speak before the preacher is an honour unparalleled. And, by the way, if the preacher have will and wit enough to manage and control the discordant elements of a negro Quarterly Conference, he will be abundantly rewarded with such respect and gratitude as a man seldom may lay claim to. They account him but a very little ‘lower than the angels;’ and their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour, are equally his at command. But wo be to the unfortunate pastor who treats them with undue indulgence; they will besiege him daily and hourly with their petty affairs, and their business meetings will be such a monopoly of his time and patience, that but for the farcical character of the same, making them more like dramatic entertainments than sober realities, he would be in despair. Far into the short hours of morning will they speechify and magnify, until nothing but the voice of stern authority, in a tone of command not to be mistaken, can stop the current.”
An Alabama gentleman whom I questioned with regard to the chastity of the so-called pious slaves, confessed, that four negro women had borne children in his own house, all of them at the time members in good standing of the Baptist church, and none of them calling any man husband. The only negro man in the house was also a church member, and he believed that he was the father of the four children. He said that he did not know of more than one negro woman whom he could suppose to be chaste, yet he knew hosts who were members of churches.[30]
A Northern clergyman who had been some years in another town in Alabama, where also the means of instruction offered the slaves were unusually good, answered my inquiry, What proportion of the coloured members of the churches in the town had any clear comprehension of the meaning of the articles of faith which they professed? “Certainly not more than one in seven.”
The acknowledgment that “the coloured people will, in spite of all our efforts, have more confidence in the views of leading coloured members,” made by the writer of the letter taken from the “Religious Herald,” has been generally made by all clergymen at the South with whom I have conversed. A clergyman of the Episcopal Church, of very frank and engaging manners, said in my presence that he had been striving for seven years to gain the confidence of the small number of Africans belonging to his congregation, and with extreme humility he had been lately forced to acknowledge that all his apparent success hitherto had been most delusive. When asked how he accounted for it, he at once ascribed it to the negro’s habitual distrust of the white race, and in discussing the causes of this distrust he asked how, if he pretended to believe that the Bible was the Word of God, addressed equally to all the human race, he could explain to a negro’s satisfaction why he should fear to put it directly into his hands and instruct him to read it and judge for himself of his duty? A planter present, a member of his church, immediately observed that these were dangerous views, and advised him to be cautious in the expression of them. The laws of the country forbade the education of negroes, and the church laws, and he trusted always would remain, the bulwark of the laws. The clergyman replied that he had no design to break the laws, but he must say that he considered that the law which withheld the Bible from the negro was unnecessary and papistical in character.[31]
The “Methodist Protestant,” a religious newspaper edited by a clergyman, in Maryland, where the slave population is to the free only in the ratio of one to twenty-five, lately printed an account of a slave auction in Java (translated from a Dutch paper), at which the father of a slave family was permitted to purchase his wife and children at a nominal price, owing to the humanity of the spectators. The account concluded as follows:—
“It would be difficult to describe the joy experienced by these slaves on hearing the fall of the hammer which thus gave them their liberty; and this joy was further augmented by the presents given them by numbers of the spectators, in order that they might be able to obtain a subsistence till such time as they could procure employment.
“These are the acts of a noble generosity that deserves to be remembered, and which, at the same time, testify that the inhabitants of Java begin to abhor the crying injustice of slavery, and are willing to entertain measures for its abolition.”