[CHAPTER X.]
THE EFFECT OF THE PAMPHLET ON ITS READER AND HEARERS.
We had seen the last day of content on Ridgewood Hill. That little scrap of paper, thrown among us perhaps by accident, or, as I have sometimes thought, dropped by the fiend of darkness himself, had conjured up a thousand of his imps, who, one after another, took up their dwelling in our breasts, until their name was Legion. My fellow-slaves cared little now for singing and dancing. Their only desire, in the intervals of labour, was to assemble together below the bluff, and dive deeper into the mysteries of the pamphlet; and as I was the only one who could explain them, and was ready enough to do so, I often neglected my little friend Tommy to preside over their convocations.
Nor were these meetings confined to the original finders of the precious document. The news had been whispered from man to man, and the sensation spread over the whole estate, so that those who lived with the major were as eager to escape from their labours and listen to the new revelation as ourselves. Nay, so great was the curiosity among them, that many who could not come when I was present to expound the secrets of the book, would betake themselves to the bluff, to indulge a look at it, and guess out its contents as they could from the pictures. And by-and-by, the news having spread to a distance, we had visiters also from the gangs of other plantations.
It was perhaps a week or more before the composition was read through and understood by us all; and in that time it had wrought a revolution in our feelings as surprising as it was fearful. And now, lest the reader should doubt that the great effects I am about to record should have really arisen from so slight a cause as a little book, I think it proper to tell him more fully than I have done what that little book contained.
It was, as I have said, an address to the owners of slaves, and its object purported to be to awaken their minds to the cruelty, injustice, and wickedness of slavery. This was sought to be effected, in the first place, by numerous cuts, representing all the cruelties and indignities that negro slaves had suffered, or could suffer, either in reality, or in the imaginations of the philanthropists. Some of these were horrible, many shocking, and all disgusting; and some of them, I think, were copied out of Fox's Book of Martyrs, though of that I am not certain. The moral turpitude and illegality of the institution were shown, or attempted to be shown, now by arguments that were handled like daggers and broad-axes, and now by savage denunciations of the enslaver and oppressor, who were proved to be murderers, blasphemers, tyrants, devils, and I know not what beside. The vengeance of Heaven was invoked upon their heads, coupled with predictions of the retribution that would sooner or later fall upon them, these being borne out by monitory allusions to the servile wars of Rome, Syria, Egypt, Sicily, St. Domingo, &c. &c. It was threatened that Heaven would repeat the plagues of Egypt in America, to punish the task-masters of the Ethiopian, as it had punished those of the Israelite, and that, in addition, the horrors of Hayti would be enacted a second time, and within our own borders. It was contended that the negro was, in organic and mental structure, the white man's equal, if not his superior, and that there was a peculiar injustice in subjecting to bondage his race, which had been (or so the writer averred), in the earlier days of the world, the sole possessors of knowledge and civilization; and there were many triumphant references to Hannibal, Queen Sheba, Cleopatra, and the Pharaohs, all of whom were proved to have been woolly-headed, and as bright in spirit as they were black in visage. In short, the book was full of strange things, and, among others, of insurrection and murder; though it is but charitable to suppose that the writer did not know it.
There was scarce a word in it that did not contribute to increase the evil spirit which its first paragraph had excited among my companions. It taught them to look on themselves as the victims of avarice, the play-things of cruelty, the foot-balls of oppression, the most injured people in the world: and the original greatness of their race, which was an idea they received with uncommon pleasure, and its reviving grandeur in the liberated Hayti, convinced them they possessed the power to redress their wrongs, and raise themselves into a mighty nation.
With the sense of injury came a thirst for revenge. My companions began to talk of violence and dream of blood. A week before there was not one of them who would not have risked his life to save his master's; the scene was now changed—my master walked daily, though without knowing it, among volcanoes; all looked upon him askant, and muttered curses as he passed. A kinder-hearted man and easier master never lived; and it may seem incredible that he should be hated without any real cause. Imaginary causes are, however, always the most efficacious in exciting jealousy and hatred, In affairs of the affections, slaves and the members of political factions are equally unreasonable. The only difference in the effect is, that the one cannot, while the other can, and does, change his masters when his whim changes.
That fatal book infected my own spirit as deeply as it did those of the others, and made me as sour and discontented as they. I began to have sentimental notions about liberty and equality, the dignity of man, the nobleness of freedom, and so-forth; and a stupid ambition, a vague notion that I was born to be a king or president, or some such great personage, filled my imagination, and made me a willing listener to, and sharer in, the schemes of violence and desperation which my fellow-slaves soon began to frame. It is wonderful, that among the many thoughts that now crowded my brain, no memory of my original condition arose to teach me the folly of my desires. But, and I repeat it again, the past was dead with me; I lived only for the present.