In the brush

by Hamilton W. Pierson

Some ten days subsequent to the date of his will he had added a codicil. In this he gave the name and date of birth of each of the four children, in the order of their birth, and added, "These are my own children," and something like an appeal that they might be permitted to receive what he had left for them, and a hope that they might enjoy all that wealth and education could procure for them.

But the saddest, strangest thing about the will was its exceeding cruelty to the rest of his slaves. He directed that they all be sold for the benefit of his children that he had freed; and, that they might bring the greatest possible price, he ordered that they all be sent to New Orleans and sold upon the block at auction—not in families, but each one alone. His will directed his executor to advertise the "sale" for three months in the principal cities of the Southwest and South, so as to secure as large an attendance as possible of negro-traders and planters wishing to buy slaves. This horrified even his pro-slavery neighbors; for, had they been sold at home, many of them would have been bought by those who owned husbands and wives that were intermarried, or had "taken up" with them, and others would have been bought in the region, so that fewer families would have been separated. His own relatives, who would otherwise have inherited this large estate, were very wealthy, and he knew that they would spare no money in contesting his will. Hence he took precautions such as I have never heard of before to prevent its being broken. After he had got it written to suit himself—and I was told that he said he was inspired to write it—he made a large dinner-party, and among others invited the prominent physicians of the neighborhood. After the usual pleasures and excitements of such a party, as his guests were about leaving, he called the physicians to his room, and said:

"Gentlemen, you all know me well, and I wish to know if, from all that you have seen to-day, you think that I am competent to make my will?"

They all answered him in the affirmative. He then said, "I wish to know if this is your professional opinion, and that if called upon you will make oath to it?"

They again gave an affirmative response. He then took his will from his pocket, and said:

"Gentlemen, here is my will, written by myself, exactly as I want to dispose of my property, and I wish to sign it in your presence, and have you sign it as witnesses," which was done. Notwithstanding these precautions, I heard of the will as before the court, of the disagreement of the jury, and of the inability of the contestants to either establish or break it. I suppose the emancipation proclamation freed all the slaves before the case was settled by the courts. Fortunately for his children, I was told that he became so alarmed about them before he died, that he sent them to Ohio, and deposited money there for their support. Otherwise they would have remained slaves during the controversy in regard to the will. I have inquired after these children at Oberlin, at Xenia, and in many of the towns and cities of Ohio, but I have never been able to hear of them. I do not know whether or not they ever received the rest of the large estate which properly belonged to them.

I have written out these facts in all this detail, thinking that they would answer in part the query whether "anything strange or interesting did ever happen to a missionary," and also to reveal a type of character and civilization with which I have very often been brought in contact. I knew a free colored woman, and she was at the time a very liberal contributor to the American Bible Society, who told me that her own daughter had been educated at a fashionable school by her white father, and was the wife of an officer in the United States Army. She visited her daughter frequently near one of the largest Northern cities, not as her mother, but as her old nurse or "mammy." Her husband supposed that her own brunette mother had died in her infancy, and that she had been "raised" by this "mammy," as such nurses were called, and hence their great affection for each other.

Within a few miles of the home of my host, in an adjoining county, I knew two colored girls whose mother was "as black as the hinges of midnight," whose white father and master had left them and a legacy for them in the care of a sister, to whom he had willed a large number of slaves; and those two girls were trained to call their mother "Margaret," and always to treat her as their "mammy." This was in anticipation of their going North to a fashionable boarding-school, and that their mother might gratify her maternal instincts by accompanying them or visiting them without detriment to their social standing or prospects. It was well known in the Southwest and South for many years before the war that, notwithstanding the intense prejudice on account of color so universal in the North, many of the most expensive and fashionable boarding-schools received pupils from Cuba, South America, and other tropical countries, even if their skins were decidedly dark. As colored children were so rigidly excluded from nearly all the best schools in the country, many availed themselves of the exception thus made in behalf of those of foreign birth by placing pupils in these schools whose tropical lineage was only "asserted" by those who paid their bills. A few Northern schools, as is well known, have always received colored pupils. Bishop Payne, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, President of Wilberforce University, Xenia, Ohio, told me during the war that before the war most of his students were those who had been born slaves and were educated by their white fathers. The stories that they have communicated to him of the sufferings they have endured as they have thought of the life to which their children were exposed if left in slavery—and as they have traveled with them up the river, and been compelled to witness the indignities to which they were exposed, as they were obliged to leave them on deck with the rough crowds of passengers, liable at all times to the basest insults, while they, as they valued their lives, dared not offer them a father's protection—would alone make a volume of painfully thrilling interest. Alas, that there were many thousands of such parents whose natures were so blunted that they cared as little for their offspring as the dumb beasts around them!

But I have said all and more than I had intended, though very far from all that I could say upon this subject, and will betake myself to more pleasant and congenial narrations of my labors in the Brush.

SUPPLEMENTARY FACTS.