"Yes!"
Of course one general shout of derision ascended from the throng. Nothing but the ringing of the bell prevented me from accepting on the spot the challenge to a fist-fight of a boy whom Lee has since cashiered from his colonelcy for selling the commissions in his regiment. After school I was taken in hand by a gentleman, then one of our belles-lettres teachers, but now a well-known and eloquent divine in New York city, who for the first time showed me how to beat an antagonist by avoiding his deductions.
"Tell G. the next time," said the present Rev. Dr. W., "that, if you saw a poor beggar-woman dying of cold and hunger, you would do all in your power to help her, though you might be far enough from wanting to marry her."
How many a non-sequitur of people who didn't sit in the boys' gallery has this simple little formula of Dr. W.'s helped me to shed aside since then!
Just after the John Brown raid, I went to Florida. I remained in the State from the first of January till the first week of the May following. I found there the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise, and the social system of Hell.
I am inclined to think that the author of the pamphlet which last spring advocated amalgamation was a Floridian. The most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was surprised at its openness. The particular friend of one family belonging to the cream of Florida society was a gentleman in thriving business who had for his mistress the waiting-maid of the daughters. He used to sit composedly with the young ladies of an evening,—one of them playing on the piano to him, the other smiling upon him over a bouquet,—while the woman he had afflicted with the burdens, without giving her the blessings, of marriage, came in curtsying humbly with a tea-tray. Everybody understood the relation perfectly; but not even the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care. One day, a lank Virginian, wintering South in the same hotel with myself, began pitching into me on the subject of "Northern amalgamators." I called to me a pretty little boy with the faintest tinge of umber in his skin, and pointed him to the lank Virginian without a word. The lank Virginian understood the answer, and sat down to read Bledsoe on the Soul. Bledsoe, as a slave-labor growth in metaphysics, (indeed, the only Southern metaphysician, if we except Governor Wise,) is much coddled at the South. I believe, besides, that he proves the divine right of Slavery a priori. If he begins with the "Everlasting Me," he must be just the kind of reading for a slave aristocrat.
It is very amusing to hear the Southerners talk of arming their slaves. I often heard them do it in Florida. I have read such Richmond Congress debates as have transpired upon the subject. I do not believe that any important steps will be taken in the matter. I have known a master mad with fear, when he saw an old gun-stock protruding from beneath one of those dog-heaps of straw and sacking called beds, in the negro-quarters. The fact that it had been thrown away by himself, had no barrel attached to it, and was picked up by a colored boy who had a passion for carving, hardly prevented the man from giving the innocent author of his fright a round "nine-and-thirty." When I was in Florida, a peculiar set of marks, like the technical "blaze," were found on certain trees in that and the adjoining State westward. The people were alive in an instant. There were editorials and meetings. The Southern heart was fired, and fired off. There was every indication of a negro uprising, and those marks pointed the way to the various rendezvous. When they were discovered to be the work of some insignificant rodent, who had put himself on bark-tonic to a degree which had never chanced to be observed before, nobody seemed ashamed, for everybody said,—"Well, it was best to be on the safe side; the thing might have happened just as well as not." I do not believe that one thinking Southern man (if any such there be in the closing hours of a desperate conspiracy) has any more idea of arming his negroes than of translating San Domingo to the threshold of his home. I should like to see the negroes whom I knew most thoroughly intrusted with blockade-run rifles, just by way of experiment. Let me recall a couple of these acquaintances.