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Life Beneath the Waters; or, The Aquarium in America. Illustrated by Plates and Wood-Cuts drawn from Life. By ARTHUR M. EDWARDS. New York: 1858.
This book has appeared since the notice in our July number of two English works on the Aquarium. Like so many books by which our literature is discredited, it is a work got up hastily to meet a public demand, and is deficient in method, thoroughness, and accuracy. There is much repetition in it, and the observations of its author seem to have been limited to the waters around New York, and to have extended over but a short period. In spite of these and other minor defects, it may be recommended as containing much useful information for those just beginning an aquarium and forming an acquaintance with the sea.
We trust that a misprint in our former notice has not brought disappointment to any of our readers, by leading them to expose their aquaria to too much sunshine; for the sunshine should be "not enough" (and not, as it was printed, "hot enough") "to raise the water to a temperature above that of the outer air."
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The Exiles of Florida: or the Crimes committed by our Government against the Maroons, who fled from South Carolina and other Slave States, seeking Protection under Spanish Laws. By JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS. Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster, & Co. 1858.
A cruel story this, Mr. Giddings tells us. Too cruel, but too true. It is full of pathetic and tragic interest, and melts and stirs the heart at once with pity for the sufferers, and with anger, that sins not, at their mean and ruthless oppressors. Every American citizen should read it; for it is an indictment which recites crimes which have been committed in his name, perpetrated by troops and officials in his service, and all done at his expense. The whole nation is responsible at the bar of the world and before the tribunal of posterity for these atrocities, devised by members of its Cabinet and its Congress, directed by its Presidents, and executed by its armies and its courts. The cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, which make the pen of Motley glow as with fire as he tells them, the dragonnades which scorched over the fairest regions of France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, have a certain excuse, as being instigated by a sincere, though misguided religious zeal. For Philip II. and Louis XIV. had, at least, a fanatical belief that they were doing God service by those holocausts of his children; while no motive inspired these massacres, tortures, and banishments, but the most sordid rapacity and avarice, the lowest and basest passions of the human breast.
And so carefully has the truth of this story been covered up with lies, that, probably, very few indeed of the people of the Free States have any just idea of the origin, character, and purposes of the Seminole Wars, or of the character of the race against which they were waged. And yet there is no episode in American history more full of romantic interest, of heroic struggles, and of moving griefs. We have been taught to believe that these wars were provoked by incursions of the savages of Florida on the frontier, and, if the truth could not be concealed, that an incidental motive of our war of extermination against them was to be found in the sanctuary which the fugitive slaves of the neighboring States found in their fastnesses. The general impression has been, that these were mainly runaways of recent date, who had made their escape from contemporary masters. How many of our readers know that for more than three quarters of a century before the purchase of Florida there had been a nation of negroes established there, enjoying the wild freedom they loved, mingling and gradually becoming identified with the Indians, who had made it their city of refuge from slavery also? For the slaveholders of Carolina had no scruples against enslaving Indians any more than Africans, until it was discovered that the untamable nature of the red man made him an unprofitable and a dangerous servant. These Indian slaves fled into the wilderness, which is now the State of Georgia, pushing their way even to the peninsula of Florida, and were followed, in their flight and to their asylum, by many of their black companions in bondage. For near seventy-five years this little nation lived happy and contented, till the State of Georgia commenced the series of piratical incursions into their country, then a Spanish dependency, from which they were never afterwards free; the nation at last taking up the slaveholders' quarrel and prosecuting it to the bitter and bloody end.
This whole story is told, and well told, by Mr. Giddings. And a most touching picture it is. First, the original evasion of the slaves into that peninsular wilderness, which they reclaimed as far as the supply of their simple wants demanded. They planted, they hunted, they multiplied their cattle, they intermarried with their Indian friends and allies, their children and their children's children grew up around them, knowing of slavery only by traditionary legend. The original founders of the tribe passed away, and their sons and grandsons possessed their corn-fields and their hunting-grounds in peace. For many years no fears disturbed their security. Under the Spanish rule they were safe and happy. Then comes the gradual gathering of the cloud on the edges of their wilderness, its first fitful and irregular flashes, till it closes over their heads and bursts upon them in universal ruin and devastation. Their heroic resistance to the invasion of the United States troops follows, sublime from its very desperation. A more unequal contest was never fought. On one side one of the mightiest powers on earth, with endless stores of men and money at its beck,—and on the other a handful of outcasts fighting for their homes, and the liberties, in no metaphorical sense, of themselves, their wives, and their children, and protracting the fight for as many years as the American Revolution lasted.
Then succeeded the victory of Slavery, and the reduction to hopeless bondage of multitudes who had been for generations free, on claim of pretended descendants of imaginary owners, by the decision of petty government-officials, without trial or real examination. More than five hundred persons, some of them recent fugitives, but mostly men born free, were thus reduced to slavery at a cost to us all of forty millions of dollars, or eighty thousand dollars for each recovered slave! Then comes their removal to the Cherokee lands, west of Arkansas, under the pledge of the faith of the nation, plighted by General Jessup, its authorized agent, that they should be sent to the West, and settled in a village separate from the Seminole Indians, and that, in the mean time, they should be protected, should not be separated, "nor any of them be sold to white men or others." This, however, was not a legitimate issue of a war waged solely for the reduction of these exiles to slavery; and so the doubts of President Polk as to the construction of this treaty were solved by Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia, who was sandwiched in between two Free-State Attorney-Generals for this single piece of dirty work, (of which transaction see a most curious account, pp. 328-9 of this book,) and who enlightened the Presidential mind by the information, that, though the exiles were entitled to their freedom, under the treaty, and had a right to remain in the towns assigned to them, "the Executive could not in any manner interfere to protect them!"