Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39. By FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Those who remember the "Journal of a Residence in America," of Frances Anne Kemble, or, as she was universally and kindly called, Fanny Kemble,—a book long since out of print, and entirely out of the knowledge of our younger readers,—will not cease to wonder, as they close these thoughtful, tranquil, and tragical pages. The earlier journal was the dashing, fragmentary diary of a brilliant girl, half impatient of her own success in an art for which she was peculiarly gifted, yet the details of which were sincerely repugnant to her. It crackled and sparkled with naïve arrogance. It criticized a new world and fresh forms of civilization with the amusing petulance of a spoiled daughter of John Bull. It was flimsy, flippant, laughable, rollicking, vivid. It described scenes and persons, often with airy grace, often with profound and pensive feeling. It was the slightest of diaries, written in public for the public; but it was universally read, as its author had been universally sought and admired in the sphere of her art; and no one who knew anything of her truly, but knew what an incisive eye, what a large heart, what a candid and vigorous mind, what real humanity, generosity, and sympathy, characterized Miss Kemble.
The dazzling phantasmagoria which life had been to the young actress was suddenly exchanged for the most practical acquaintance with its realities. She was married, left the stage, and as a wife and mother resided for a winter on the plantations of her husband upon the coast of Georgia. And now, after twenty-five years, the journal of her residence there is published. It has been wisely kept. For never could such a book speak with such power as at this moment. The tumult of the war will be forgotten, as you read, in the profound and appalled attention enforced by this remarkable revelation of the interior life of Slavery. The spirit, the character, and the purpose of the Rebellion are here laid bare. Its inevitability is equally apparent. The book is a permanent and most valuable chapter in our history; for it is the first ample, lucid, faithful, detailed account, from the actual head-quarters of a slave-plantation in this country, of the workings of the system,—its persistent, hopeless, helpless crushing of humanity in the slave, and the more fearful moral and mental dry-rot it generates in the master.
We have had plenty of literature upon the subject. First of all, in spirit and comprehension, the masterly, careful, copious, and patient works of Mr. Olmsted. But he, like Arthur Young in France, was only an observer. He could be no more. "Uncle Tom," as its "Key" shows, and as Mrs. Kemble declares, was no less a faithful than the most famous witness against the system. But it was a novel. Then there was "American Slavery as it is," a work of authenticated facts, issued by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, and the fearful mass of testimony incessantly published by the distinctively Abolition papers, periodicals, books, and orators, during the last quarter of a century. But the world was deaf. "They have made it a business. They select all the horrors. They accumulate exceptions." Such were the objections that limited the power of this tremendous battery. Meanwhile, also, it was answered. Foreign tourists were taken to "model plantations." They shed tears over the patriarchal benignity of this venerable and beautiful provision of Divine Providence for the spiritual training of our African fellow-creatures. The affection of "Mammy" for "Massa and Missis" was something unknown where hired labor prevailed. Graver voices took up the burden of the song. There was no pauperism in a slave-country. There were no prostitutes. It had its disadvantages, certainly; but what form of society, what system of labor has not? Besides, here it was. It was the interest of slaveholders to be kind. And what a blessing to bring the poor heathen from benighted Africa and pagan servitude to the ennobling influences of Slavery, as practised among Southwestern Christians in America, and "professors" in South Carolina and Georgia! See the Reverend Mr. Adams and Miss Murray passim. This was the answer made to the statements of the actual facts of the system, when it was found that the question had gone before public opinion, and would be decided upon its merits by that tribunal, all the panders, bullies, assassins, apologists, and chaplains of Slavery to the contrary notwithstanding. In fact, when that was once clearly perceived, the issue was no less visible; only whether it were to be reached by war or peace was not so plain.
Yet in all this tremendous debate which resounds through the last thirty years of our history, rising and swelling until every other sound was lost in its imperious roar, one decisive voice was silent. It was precisely that which is heard in this book. General statements, harrowing details from those who had been slaveholders, and who had renounced Slavery, were sometimes made public. Indeed, the most cruel and necessary incidents, the hunting with blood-hounds, the branding, the maiming, the roasting, the whipping of pregnant women, could not be kept from knowledge. They blazed into print. But the public, hundreds of miles away, while it sighed and shuddered a little, resolved that such atrocities were exceptional. 'Twas a shocking pity, to be sure! Poor things! Women, too! Tut, tut!
Now, at last, we have no general statement, no single, sickening incident, but the diary of the mistress of plantations of seven hundred slaves, living under the most favorable circumstances, upon the islands at the mouth of the Altamaha River, in Georgia. It is a journal, kept from day to day, of the actual ordinary life of the plantation, where the slaves belonged to educated, intelligent, and what are called the most respectable people,—not persons imbruted by exile among slaves upon solitary islands, but who had lived in large Northern cities and the most accomplished society, subject to all the influences of the highest civilization. It is the journal of a hearty, generous, clear-sighted woman, who went to the plantation, loving the master, and believing, that, though Slavery might be sad, it might also be mitigated, and the slave might be content. It is the record of ghastly undeceiving,—of the details of a system so wantonly, brutally, damnably unjust, inhuman, and degrading, that it blights the country, paralyzes civilization, and vitiates human nature itself. The brilliant girl of the earlier journal is the sobered and solemnized matron of this. The very magnitude of the misery that surrounds her, the traces of which everywhere sadden her eye and wring her heart, compel her to the simplest narration. There is no writing for effect. There is not a single "sensational" passage. The story is monotonous; for the wrong it describes is perpetual and unrelieved. "There is not a single natural right," she says, after some weeks' residence, "that is not taken away from these unfortunate people; and the worst of all is, that their condition does not appear to me, upon further observation of it, to be susceptible of even partial alleviation, as long as the fundamental evil, the Slavery itself, remains."
As the mistress of the plantation, she was brought into constant intercourse with the slave-women; and no other account of this class is so thorough and plainly stated. So pitiful a tale was seldom told. It was a "model plantation"; but every day was darkened to the mistress by the appeals of these women and her observation of their condition. The heart of the reader sickens as hers despaired. To produce "little niggers" for Massa and Missis was the enforced ambition of these poor women. After the third week of confinement they were sent into the fields to work. If they lingered or complained, they were whipped. For beseeching the mistress to pray for some relief in their sad straits, they were also whipped. If their tasks were unperformed, or the driver lost his temper, they were whipped again. If they would not yield to the embrace of the overseer, they were whipped once more. How are they whipped? They are tied by the wrists to a beam or the branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the ground, so that they are utterly powerless to resist; their clothes are turned over their heads, and their backs scarred with a leathern thong, either by the driver himself, or by father, brother, husband, or lover, if the driver choose to order it. What a blessing for these poor heathen that they are brought to a Christian land! When a band of pregnant women came to their master to implore relief from overwork, he seemed "positively degraded" to his wife, as he stood urging them to do their allotted tasks. She began to fear lest she should cease to respect the man she loved; "for the details of slaveholding are so unmanly, letting alone every other consideration, that I know not how any one with the spirit of a man can condescend to them." The master gives a slave as a present to an overseer whose administration of the estate was agreeable to him. The slave is intelligent and capable, the husband of a wife and the father of children, and they are all fondly attached to each other. He passionately declares that he will kill himself rather than follow his new master and leave wife and children behind. Roused by the storm of grief, the wife opens the door of her room, and beholds her husband, with his arms folded, advising his slave "not to make a fuss about what there is no help for." The same master insists that there is no hardship or injustice in whipping a woman who asks his wife to intercede for her, but confesses that it is "disagreeable." At last he tells her that she must no longer fatigue him with the "stuff" and "trash" which "the niggers," who are "all d——d liars," make her believe, and henceforward closes his ears to all complaint.
Yet this was a model plantation, and this was probably not a hard master, as masters go. "These are the conditions which can only be known to one who lives among them. Flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really beastly existence, is the normal condition of these men and women; and of that no one seems to take heed, nor had I ever heard it described so as to form any adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into it.... Industry, man's crown of honor elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degradation; and so comes all by which I am here surrounded,—pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty, cowardice, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement."
And yet this is the system which we have been in the habit of calling patriarchal, because the model masters said it was so, and trade was too prosperous to allow any difference with them! And these are the model masters, supported in luxury by all this unpaid labor and untold woe, these women-whippers and breeders of babies for sale, who have figured in our talk and imaginations as "the chivalry" and "gentlemen"! These are they to whom American society has koo-too'd, and in whose presence it has been ill-bred and uncourteous to say that every man has rights, that every laborer is worthy of his hire, that injustice is unjust, and uncleanness foul. No wonder that Russell, coming to New York, and finding the rich men and the political confederates of the conspirators declaring that the Government of the United States could not help itself, and that they would allow no interference with their Southern friends, sincerely believed what he wished to, and wrote to John Bull, whose round face was red with eager desire to hear it, that the Revolution was virtually accomplished. No wonder that the haughty slaveholders, smeared with sycophantic slime, at Newport, at Saratoga, in the "polite" and "conservative" Northern circles, believed what Mr. Hunter of Virginia told a Massachusetts delegate to the Peace Congress,—that there would be no serious trouble, and that the Montgomery Constitution would be readily adopted by the "conservative" sentiment of the North.
Mrs. Kemble's book shows what the miserable magic is that enchants these Southern American citizens into people whose philosophy of society would disgrace the Dark Ages, and whose social system is that of Dahomey.