How can the acts of this Virginia slaveholder be explained? Why did he deal kindly with his slaves? What led him to make such great pecuniary sacrifices in manumitting them? The explanation is probably in part to be found in the benevolent disposition with which God had endowed him; but in addition to this he was a genuine Christian. He was vitally united to Christ. Christ was in him and he had the Spirit of Christ. He was living the life of Christ. He had much of Christ’s love to his fellow men. He never for a moment doubted the manhood of his slaves, and he felt impelled by the spirit within him to treat them as his fellow men. He was a constant reader of the Bible. He had, I think, the best-thumbed New Testament in my entire congregation, and the truths of the gospel were antagonistic to slavery. He evidently very profoundly believed what the great apostle to the Gentiles wrote: “There is neither bond nor free: for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”
A few months after I made my home in St. Louis, my good deacon wished me to go with him a few miles out of the city and call upon Captain Harper, one of his close friends. He did not tell me the real reason why he wished me to make the captain a visit, but thereby hangs an interesting tale. On a beautiful autumn day, we drove out to the farmhouse of his friend. We were welcomed with genuine Southern hospitality. After a few moments conversation under the shade-trees in front of the house, Mr. Brotherton said, “I think that you would enjoy a walk over the farm with Captain Harper.” To this I eagerly assented. The farm appeared to be in perfect order; the fences were well built, the fields were thoroughly tilled, and the maturing crops were abundant. It was the best kept farm that it had been my lot to see up to that time in my adopted State. There were several hundred acres of it. Here and there in different directions I saw on the farm neat cottages painted white. I asked the captain what they were. He told me that they were occupied by German and Irish families, the families of the men who worked his farm. “A few years ago,” he said, “I carried on this plantation by slave labor. I had twenty-one slaves. But one day as I was walking across this field, where we now are, the thought came to me for the first time in my life that my slaves had the same right to themselves and to the product of their labor, that I had to myself and the product of my toil. And this conviction was strong and persistent; I could not shake it off. But what could I do with my slaves? The laws of the State were such that if I should give them their freedom they would be worse off than in their bondage. I then thought of the Colonization Society and decided to free my slaves, and, if I could get their consent, to send them to Liberia. I called them all together one day in my dooryard, and told them that I had been convinced that I had no just right to them or to their labor; but I pointed out to them the woful plight of free negroes in Missouri, told them of the free State of Liberia, of the Colonization Society and of my wish to send them to live among their own people in Africa. I told them that they were now at liberty to do as they pleased, but that I should advise them to learn trades, and if they would do so, at the end of three years I would send them to Liberia. They all accepted my offer, except Mammy, whom you saw at the house. She said that she would not go ‘nowhere for nobody;’ and she has never left my home. Some of my slaves learned the trade of the carpenter and joiner, some that of the shoemaker, some that of the mason, others that of the cooper, and some of them remained here on the farm and I did what I could to teach them to be independent farmers. When the three years of their apprenticeship had passed, I sent them through the Colonization Society to Africa.” As I listened to this wonderful story, so modestly and artlessly told, I felt like taking off my hat to my new acquaintance. This was a kind of abolitionist that I had never before met. For conscience’ sake he freed, educated, and deported his slaves to a free state. It cost him fully sixty thousand dollars. But he cheerfully made the sacrifice that he might satisfy his sense of justice. I knew now why my deacon had been so insistent that I should with him visit Captain Harper. The Captain was a man after his own heart. Both had been born and reared in the midst of slavery, and both had become emancipators of their own slaves. They were practical abolitionists, but both would then have indignantly repudiated a title so opprobrious at that time in their own neighborhood and State.
Richard Anderson, the colored Baptist pastor to whom we have referred in a previous chapter, caring for a church, the members of which were fully half slaves, had many interesting and suggestive experiences. One winter he conducted for a few days a protracted meeting. At the close of an earnest and sensible sermon,—for he was an excellent preacher, sometimes truly eloquent,—he invited those who wished to be Christians and desired the prayers of the Church to come forward and take the front seat immediately before the pulpit. It was called the “mourners’ bench.” Those who occupied it were supposed to be mourning over their sins. Six persons, four men and two women, in response to his invitation came forward and occupied that front seat. As he stood before them he saw at a glance that they were all slaves, and his talk to them was suited to their condition. He had a quaint humor of which he appeared to be quite unconscious. Among other things he said, “You are slaves; you belong to your masters; you have very little in common with other people. But there is one verse in the Bible that was written especially for you: ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and ye that have no money, yea, come.’ Now you have no money, but you can have as much religion as any one else; you can have as much as the President of the United States, and a good deal more than I believe he has got.” Mr. Buchanan, who was still in the White House, was very unpopular among the colored people, which may account for this surprising and mirth-provoking remark on so solemn an occasion.
But this colored pastor had many sad, heart-breaking trials. This is one of them. Two members of his congregation, a widowed mother and her little daughter, were slaves in the family of a Presbyterian deacon. In the autumn of 1860 the mother came to him, sobbing and wringing her hands, because her master had determined to sell her to a New Orleans slave-trader, and to retain in his own household her little daughter. She must take her chances in the dreaded slave market, and be sold to whom she knew not, a fate from which the slaves of the border States shrank with untold horror, and must be torn from her only child, her greatest earthly solace. But what could her pastor do? He too belonged to the servile race, and in his boyhood had been a slave. Too vehement protestation on his part would damage the case rather than help it. But he fearlessly sought out her master, and pleaded as well as he could the case of the distressed mother. Whatever the deacon may have felt as he listened to the modest, earnest pleading of that great-hearted black pastor, he inflexibly held to his resolution to sell his dark-skinned sister in Christ; not that she had been an unfaithful or inefficient servant, but because the deacon needed money, and as he thought must have it. So he carried out his purpose. The day came when, with a hundred or more consigned to the same pitiless fate, she boarded the steamer at the levee to be carried to her doom. Her little slave daughter was there to give her the last tearful kiss and embrace. Her faithful pastor stood by filled with sorrow and deep down in his soul hot with righteous wrath. The steamer moved out from the levee, the anguished mother and the pastor waved to each other their red bandanas, and slowly the vessel with its freight of sorrow disappeared down the river.
Immediately after, I met this pastor with his burden of grief, and he told me the sad tale. He said: “Think of it! she came to me for comfort. And I did the best I could.” I said to him, “I don’t see what you could have said to comfort her.” He replied, “There was not much that I could say; but I did tell her that God was down there as well as up here, and in some way he would take care of her, and that when she got to heaven, where the wicked cease from troubling, she would not find that Presbyterian deacon there to torment her.” He uttered this in dead earnestness, and with a solemn gravity befitting the heart-breaking story, seemingly without the slightest consciousness of the mingled humor and sarcasm of his last declaration.
Belonging to my congregation, though not a member of my church, was a banker and slaveholder. He was a Mississippian by birth and education, and profoundly believed in the righteousness of slavery. Knowing that I came from the North, he set out to convince me that African slavery was not only right, but beneficent and beautiful. But he little suspected how difficult the job was that he had undertaken. However, to attain his object, he proceeded in a cautious, artful manner. He invited me and mine to dinner. It was a very natural move for a man to make in reference to his pastor. But once warmly welcomed under his roof and to his table loaded with the best from the market, his unseemly ardor in setting forth the attractiveness of the “peculiar institution” slightly revealed his ulterior purpose in making me a recipient of his bountiful hospitality. But the dinner was good, his wife was a charming hostess and his young daughters were winsome. Under the circumstances it became me to be a good listener, to make some commonplace remarks, and to ask questions with an air of innocence. This seemed to encourage mine host, and he set forth with much particularity and with the accent of conviction the manifold benefits of slavery as it existed in the United States. I made no adverse comment, which incited him to illustrate the beauties of human bondage by the condition of the slaves in his own household. He was the proud owner of two. One of them was a mulatto, over six feet in height, and between twenty-five and thirty years of age. He was good-looking, and evidently a man of energy and decision. My host said, “Did you see Wash when you came in?” I assured him that I did, and that I was very much impressed by him. “Well,” he said, “Wash has been with me for many years; I think a great deal of him, and he is warmly attached to me and my family. Nothing could persuade him to leave me. I have perfect confidence in him. He is also a man of good judgment. I never buy a horse or trade horses unless I first get Wash’s opinion.” And so he went on extolling his slave, who seemed to me to be a manlier man than his master.
Having exhausted the subject of Wash, he began to dilate on Mammy. “Did you notice her?” he said. “She waited on the table. She has nursed these daughters of ours, and loves them as though they were her own children and they love her. Why, sir, she is so attached to her home and to us all that nothing could tempt her to leave us.” Well, to hear mine host talk, if one had never known anything about slavery except what he set forth, it could not but have been considered in some respects a beneficent institution.
He at last asked his wife to play the piano, while the young daughters danced. I noticed Mammy in an adjoining room, looking in upon the happy scene and in her delight showing her ivory. About ten o’clock, with many warm wishes each for the prosperity of the other, we parted, I to think of the beneficence and beauty of slavery, and my host probably to contemplate his success in commending to my good graces an institution that I had been educated to abhor.
But what was the sequel of that evening’s conversation? What light did the immediate future throw back upon it? Was my genial host’s emphatic and repeated declaration that nothing could entice Wash and Mammy from their home verified? The war came on apace. Everything appeared to be out of joint. The most stable relations of life were unexpectedly and strangely upset. Property in slaves grew precarious. And the first slave in St. Louis reported in the papers as having run away was Wash.
His master was an officer of a bank. The young men employed there, to whom he had declared as he did to me that nothing could induce Wash to leave him, asked him if he intended to catch his runaway slave and bring him back. He replied, “No, let him go, I never liked to have him around anyway; I am glad that he has gone.” While this quite flatly contradicted his previous utterances, under the circumstances it was wisest not to attempt to apprehend his fleeing chattel. But for many weeks, almost every day, some one in the bank would exasperatingly ask him, “How is Wash?” But did Mammy, so full of affection and so delighted with her home, prove true to her master and mistress? About two weeks after Wash’s departure, she left without giving notice to the family. She slept in the second story of the house. In the night she made up a budget for herself, and threw it out into the yard. She then made a rope of her bed-clothes, fastened one end of it to her bedstead, and threw the other out of the window. Her improvised rope reached nearly to the ground. She climbed down the rope, took up her budget and departed. That household never saw that devoted mammy again. Such incidents are representative of hundreds of others at that time. To be sure many of the slaves were true to their masters and remained with their families to the close of the war; but those who wished to leave did so, and the fugitive slave law, having suddenly become a dead letter, could no longer be invoked to catch them.