CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT INSPIRATION
That charming writer and whole-souled man, Colonel T. W. Higginson, somewhere tells us that all the things he ever heard or read about slavery did not fix in his soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave market that he once saw. He says that as he sat here, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait on his wife. Colonel Higginson saw three little sisters brought in who were from eight to twelve years old; they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean and whole. He saw the gentleman choose one of them and heard him ask her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him. She burst into tears and said, “I would rather stay with my mother.”[13] But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean.
That was the story. All the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he said, all the stories told him by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs he afterward saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress him as did that hour in the gaol. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before his mind. It seemed to him that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system; and he thought that a woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.
Of such ignorance as this no one can accuse Mrs. Stowe. The personal touch that should fire knowledge into passion and make her keenly feel what had been hitherto but a part of her theory she also was to receive.
From her earliest housekeeping she had had “help” from the colony of Cincinnati colored people. In the year 1839 a certain colored girl came to work for her who had been a slave, but who had been brought by her mistress into Ohio and left there, and thus by the laws of Ohio made free. But by this time a new national requirement was under discussion called the Fugitive Slave Law; by this law the people of such a state as Ohio were to be commanded to give back to their masters all colored persons found in their territory, unless they had been set free by special papers stating the fact and showing that payment had been made to the former owners. By this law the master of the girl that worked for Mrs. Stowe could come over the line and if he could find his former slave could reclaim her. And all people were to be required to aid the owners to gain possession of their runaway slaves. People who did not believe in the justice of such a law as this thought it right to evade it; and among these was the Beecher family. So when it was known that the former master of the girl was in the city looking for his property, Professor Stowe and Henry planned to conceal the girl from him. They put the fugitive in a carriage and together drove out into the country in the darkest hours of a dismal, stormy night. Following along Mill Creek to the first “station” in the underground railway, they put her in the care of the sturdy Quaker farmer, Mr. John Vanzandt, who protected her until she could be taken further on her way to Canada.
This is the law that is referred to in Chapter IX of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Mrs. Bird, that timid, blushing little woman who was about four feet in height, had mild blue eyes and a peach-blow complexion, and the gentlest, sweetest voice in the world; as for her courage, a moderate-sized cock turkey had been known to put her to rout at the very first gobble, and a stout house dog of moderate capacity would bring her into subjection merely by a show of his teeth. And yet when she heard of this new law she stood up before her husband (who was a Senator and had voted for it!) and cried out, “Now, John, I want to know if you think such a law as that is right and Christian?” Her husband, the Senator, tried to argue her out of her prejudice, but did not succeed; and then, as every one remembers, this same sound-hearted Senator was the first to let his heart have sway when one of the poor runaways came distressed and hunted to the door asking for rescue.
It was Eliza, who had made her way across the river, springing from ice-block to ice-block, in the way so often pictured, and, strange to say, so true also to the fact. Kind Mrs. Bird made her comfortable on a settle by the fire. After this Eliza told the pathetic story of her escape and gave the real deep reason why she desired to leave her home in Kentucky. It was not merely a passion for freedom, though that intensely American trait was no doubt the fundamental cause why many colored people were willing to leave owners that gave them good homes and had not been specially unkind to them to launch out upon a hazardous attempt to win support in commercial lines for which they had no training. Let us read this passage, and find in it the aspect that most appealed to the soul of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“‘Were you a slave?’ said Mr. Bird.
“‘Yes, sir; I belonged to a man in Kentucky.’
“‘Was he unkind to you?’