THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

VOL. IV, DECEMBER, 1859, NO. XXVI

THE EXPERIENCE OF SAMUEL ABSALOM, FILIBUSTER.

In the winter of 1856, the outlook of the present writer, known somewhere as Samuel Absalom, became exceedingly troubled, and indeed scarcely respectable. As gold-digger in California, Fortune had looked upon him unkindly, and he was grown to be one of the indifferent, ragged children of the earth. Those who came behind him might read as they ran, stamped on canvas once white, "Stockton Mills. Self-Rising Flour!"—the well-known label in California, at that day, of greatest embarrassment.

One morning, after sleeping out the night in the streets of Oroville, he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village newspaper:—"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and romantic moonlit nights." "Listen to this scoundrel!" said he; "how he can insult an unfortunate man! Makes his own living braying, lying, and flinging dirt, and spits upon us sad devils who fail to do it in an honest manner! Ah, the times are changing in California! Once, no one knew but this battered hat I sit under might partially cover the head of a nobleman or man of honor; but men begin to show their quality by the outside, as they do elsewhere in the world, and are judged and spoken to accordingly. I will shake California dust from my feet, and be gone!"

In this mood, I thought of General Walker, down there in Nicaragua, striving to regenerate the God-forsaken Spanish Americans. "I will go down and assist General Walker," said I. So next morning found me on my way to San Francisco, with a roll of blankets on my shoulder and some small pieces of money in my pocket. Arrived in the city, I sought out General Walker's agent, one Crittenden by name, a respectable, honest-looking man, and obtained from him the promise of two hundred and fifty acres of Nicaraguan land and twenty-five dollars per month for service in the army of General Walker, and also a steerage-ticket of free passage to the port of San Juan del Norte by one of the steamers of the Nicaragua Transit Line. Of my voyage down I do not intend to speak; several unpublished sensations might have been picked up in that steerage crowd of bog Irish, low Dutch, New Yorkers, and California savages of every tribe, returning home in red flannel shirts and boots of cowhide large; but my business is not with them, and I say only that after a brief and prosperous voyage we anchored early one morning in the harbor of San Juan del Sur, at that time part of the dominions of General Walker.

Whilst the great crowd of home-bound passengers, with infinite din and shouting, are bustling down the gangways toward the shore, our little party of twenty or thirty Central American regenerators assemble on the ship's bow, and answer to our names as read out by a small, mild-featured man, whom at a glance I should have thought no filibuster. It seems he was our captain pro tem., and bore recommendations from the agent at San Francisco to a commission in the Nicaraguan service. He had made the voyage on the cabin side of the ship, and I saw him now for the first time. His looks betokened no fire-eating soul; but your brave man has not necessarily a truculent countenance; and I was, indeed, thankful for the prospect of fighting under an honest man and no cut-throat outwardly.