In the brush

by Hamilton W. Pierson

He then inquired after my plans for the supply of his county with Bibles. I told him that I had spent the previous Sabbath at the county-seat, and gave him the names of all the men that had been elected as officers of the County Bible Society, and of the colporteurs that had been chosen to canvass and supply the county. He knew them all, and approved the choice that had been made. I then said:

"I have ordered a large supply of Bibles from New York, and I am quite sure I can depend upon the people of the county to meet the expenses of this work."

"Yes," said he, thrusting his hand into his pocket, and taking out and opening his pocket-book, and handing me a bill, "there is twenty dollars for T—— County"; and, handing me another bill, "There is ten dollars for the world."

I was very much gratified with his appropriation of the money, as I saw that, in my conversations with him, I had given him a clear idea of the local or home work and the general or foreign work carried on by the American Bible Society.

A bountiful supper followed, and the evening passed very pleasantly and rapidly in conversation; with many reminiscences of our life at the Springs, and the various persons we had met there. At length he ordered the Bible brought forward, and the servants summoned for prayers. A large number, including the house-servants, and their husbands and children who lived in the kitchen and other adjacent buildings, were soon assembled. The master and myself were the only white persons in the group. He sat near me in a large chair, thin, pale, and sickly, his two crutches lying across his legs, and seemed profoundly interested and impressed. With a stillness that was almost motionless and breathless, and with a fixed, an earnest, an excited attention, such as I have never seen, only as I have seen it in many similar groups, they all listened while I read to them a portion of the blessed Word of God—that Word that I have found so potent to soothe and cheer and bless the most ignorant and the most oppressed—and then we all bowed together before our common Father, and in language as simple as I could command I earnestly besought his blessing to rest upon them all, and commended master and slaves to his compassionate care and love. As, after the lapse of so many years, the long-closed chambers of memory open at my bidding, and, recalling this scene, I for the first time commit it to pages that can be read by others, it all stands revealed before me, so vivid, so present, so unspeakably tender and precious in its memories, that again and again I have been compelled to lay down my pen and wipe the fast-falling tears that would flow as I have lived over again the golden, glorious hour thus spent in communing with God and comforting his enslaved and suffering poor. The same divine power comes down upon me now, while I write, as when I knelt in the midst of that dark group, melting my soul with a tenderness so inexpressibly sweet, and irradiating my whole being with a joy so unearthly that I can but exclaim with the poetess:

"Tell us if the gleams of glory,
Bursting on us when we pray,
Are not transient, blest revealings
Of our home, so far away;
Loving glances of our Father,
Sent to lure our souls away."

A delightful night's rest was followed by a most beautiful day. A morning stroll revealed to me the character and extent of my host's plantation. His residence was a large brick house, standing in the midst of a grove of forest-trees, and presented a most neglected, not to say dilapidated, appearance. A great many panes of glass had been broken from the windows; the doors were out of order; it had been unpainted for many years; the fences, out-buildings, and everything about it had a "tumble-down" look, and all presented about as "shiftless" an appearance as ever distressed the soul of a neat and thrifty Miss Ophelia. If my memory is not at fault, the plantation contained one thousand acres. It was as rich, productive, and beautiful land as I have ever seen. It lay in the heart of one of the finest tobacco-growing regions in the United States. The stock, most of which was "blooded," and of the finest quality, presented noble subjects for the pencil of a Rosa Bonheur, as they were feeding in his large pastures, where the blue grass was up to my horse's knees. The buildings I have already described sadly marred a landscape of exceeding beauty. This was the paternal estate. He had lived with his parents until their death, and, being the youngest son and an invalid, they had given him the homestead, providing liberally for the other members of the family, who lived in adjoining counties and were very wealthy. The place was cultivated by his own slaves, who, including old and young, I think must have numbered nearly or quite a hundred.

Shall I describe the household?

My host was unmarried. I do not know his age. I remember that his hair was so much frosted that it was decidedly iron-gray; but I am sure that it must have been prematurely so, on account of the great suffering he had endured. His housekeeper was a large, fat, gross-looking negro woman, one of his own slaves. But she was more than his housekeeper—she was the mother of his children. Here was one of those strange, unaccountable, revolting alliances—far more common than the great world has ever dreamed—that set at defiance the laws of God not only, but all other laws—where the one least attractive of all upon the plantation becomes the master's unholy choice. It hardly required the second look to detect among the groups of colored children that were playing about the yard four who bore to their father the double relation of children and slaves. The two eldest were girls, probably six and eight years old, and they had his light gray eyes, his double chin, and, indeed, all his features much more strongly marked than is usual where both the parents are either white or black. In their color, his white blood preponderated very largely over that of the mother; their hair indicated their African parentage much more positively than their skin. The two boys were much darker than their sisters, and the features of their father were less strongly though indisputably marked. The youngest was a handsome little fellow not more than three or four years old.

Here, then, to any one who had seen but a tithe of what had fallen under my observation in years of horseback-riding where I had been in constant communication with masters and slaves, was the full explanation of the intense interest and anxiety of my host in regard to the schools and laws in the free States. Here was a mind agitated with the most terrible conflicts, the most excruciating anxieties, that ever raged in the human heart. Here were the pangs of a guilty conscience in regard to the past; and all the instincts of a father moved to their profoundest depths in behalf of his children, who were legal slaves. He knew, even better than I did, the unutterably terrible future that awaited them as slaves. He knew not only the possibilities but the probabilities in regard to the fate of his daughters, which the laws and the customs of society rendered doubly sure. It was to a mind thus agitated and distressed that I had brought the sweet message, "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." It was to a spirit thus moved that I unfolded the fullness and the freeness of the forgiveness and salvation purchased by the sufferings and death of the "Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." It was to one thus involved and entangled in the meshes of sin that I spoke of a Deliverer from its thralldom and power. O wondrous message! Often as I have looked into the faces of the vilest of the vile, I have been thrilled and startled at the sound of my own voice as I have proclaimed to them: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."