“Heureux l’homme qu’un doux hymen unira avec elle! il n’aura à craindre que de la perdre et de lui survivre.”—Fenelon.
It was that Fourth of July, 1863, when every sincere friend of the Great Republic felt his heart beat high with mingled hope and apprehension. Tremendous issues, which must affect the people of the American continent through all coming time, were in the balance of Fate, and the capricious chances of war might turn the scale on either side. Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Helena! The great struggles that were to make these places memorable had reached their culminating and critical point, but were as yet undecided.
Lee’s Rebel army of invasion, highly disciplined, and numbering nearly a hundred thousand men, was marching into Pennsylvania. General Lee assured his friends he should remain North just as long as he wished; that there was no earthly power strong enough to drive him back across the Potomac. He expected “to march on Baltimore and occupy it; then to march on Washington and dictate terms of peace.”
Such was Lee’s plan. Its success depended on his defeating the Union army; and of that he felt certain.
The loyal North was unusually reticent and grave; “troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair.” A change of commanders in the army of the Potomac, when just on the eve of the decisive contest, added to the general seriousness.
Clara, since her parting from Vance, had addressed herself thoughtfully to the business of life. Duties actively discharged had brought with them their reward in a diffusive cheerfulness.
On the morning of that eventful Fourth of July, the ringing of bells and the firing of cannon roused her from slumber somewhat earlier than usual. On the piazza she met Netty Pompilard, and Mary and Julia Ireton, and Master and Miss Purling, and they all strolled to the river’s side,—then home to breakfast,—then out to the mown field by the orchard, where a mammoth tent had been erected, and servants were spreading tables for the day’s entertainment, to be given by Clara to all the poor and rich of the neighborhood. Colonel Hyde, having been commissioned to superintend the arrangements, was here in his glory, and not a little of his importance was reflected on the busy cripple, his nephew.
Clara’s thoughts, however, were at Gettysburg, where brave men were giving up their lives and exposing themselves to terrible, life-wasting wounds, in order that we at home might live in peace and have a country, free and undishonored. She thought of Vance. She knew he had resigned his colonelcy, and was now employed in the important and hazardous, though untrumpeted labors of a scout or spy, for which he felt that his old practice as an actor had given him some aptitude. We subjoin a few fragmentary extracts from the last letter she had received from him:—
“Poor Peek,—rather let me say fortunate Peek! He fell nobly, as he always desired to fall, in the cause of freedom and humanity. His son, Sterling, is now with me; a bright, brave little fellow, who is already a great comfort and help.”
“Until the North are as much in earnest for the right as the South are for the wrong, we must not expect to see an end to this war. It is not enough to say, ‘Our cause is just. Providence will put it through.’ If we don’t think the right and the just worth making great sacrifices for,—worth risking life and fortune for,—we repel that aid from Heaven which we lazily claim as our due. God gives Satan power to try the nations as he once tried Job. ‘Skin for skin,’ says Satan; ‘yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.’ Unless we have pluck enough to disprove the Satanic imputation, and to show we prize God’s kingdom on earth more than we do life or limb or worldly store, then it is not a good cause that will save us, but a sordid spirit that will ruin us. O for a return of that inspiration which filled us when the first bombardment of Sumter smote on our ears!”
“The President will soon call for three hundred thousand more volunteers. O women of the North!—ye whose heart-wisdom foreruns the slow processes of our masculine reason,—lend yourselves forthwith to the great work of raising this force and sending it to fill up our depleted armies.”
“This Upas-tree of slavery is now girdled, they tell us. ‘Why not leave it to the winds of heaven to blow down?’ But if this whirlwind of civil war can’t do it, don’t trust to the zephyrs of peace. No! The President’s proclamation must be carried into effect on every plantation, in every dungeon, where a slave exists. Better that this generation should go down with harness on to its grave, and that war should be the normal state of the next generation, than that we should fail in our pledged faith to the poor victims of oppression whose masters have brought the sword.”
The grand entertainment under the tent lasted late into the afternoon. An excellent band of music was present, and as the tunes were selected by Clara, they were all good. Pompilard was, of course, a prominent figure at the table. He was toast-master, speech-maker, and general entertainer. He said pleasant things to the women and found amusements for the children. He complimented “the gallant Colonel Hyde” on his “very admirable arrangements” for their comfort; and the Colonel replied in a speech, in which he declared that much of the honor belonged to his sister Dorothy, and his nephew, Andrew Jackson.
In a high-flown tribute to the Emerald Isle, “the land of the Emmetts and of that brave hater of slavery, O’Connell,” Pompilard called up Maloney, who, in a fiery little harangue, showed that he did not lack that gift of extemporaneous eloquence which the Currans and the Grattans used so lavishly to exhibit. The band played “Rory O’More.”
A compliment to “the historian of the war” called up Purling, who, in the lack of one arm, made the other do double duty in gesticulating. He was cheered to his heart’s content. The band played “Hail Columbia.”
A compliment to the absent Captain Delaney Hyde Rusk drew from his uncle this sentiment: “The poor whites of the South! may the Lord open their eyes and send them plenty of soap!” The band played “Dixie.”
A venerable clergyman present, the Rev. Mr. Beitler, now rose and gave “The memory of our fallen brave!” This was drunk standing in solemn silence, with heads uncovered. But Mrs. Ireton and Clara vainly put their handkerchiefs to their faces to keep back their sobs. By a secret sympathy they sought each other, and sat down under a tree where they could be somewhat retired from the rest. Esha drew near, but had too much tact to disturb them.
It was four o’clock when a courier was seen running toward the assembled company. He came with an “Extra,” containing that telegraphic despatch from the President of the United States, flashed over the wires that day, giving comforting assurances from Gettysburg. Pompilard stood on a chair and proposed a succession of cheers, which were vociferously delivered. Clara and Mrs. Ireton dried their tears and partook of the general joy. Then rapping on the table, Pompilard obtained profound silence; and the old clergyman, kneeling, addressed the Throne of Grace in words of thankfulness that found a response in every heart. The day’s amusements ended in a stroll of the company through the beautiful grounds.
After the glory the grief. No sooner was it known that Lee, whipped and crestfallen, was retreating, than there was a call for succor to the wounded and the dying. Clara, under the escort of Major Purling (who was eager to glean materials for the great history) went immediately to Gettysburg. She visited the churches (converted into hospitals), where wounded men, close as they could lie, were heroically enduring the sharpest sufferings. She labored to increase their accommodations. If families wouldn’t give up their houses for love, then they must for money. Yes, money can do it. She drew on her trustees till they were frightened at the repetition of big figures in her drafts. She soothed the dying; she made provision for the wounded; she ordered the wholesomest viands for those who could eat.
On the third day she met Mrs. Charlton and her daughter, and they affectionately renewed their acquaintance. As they walked together through a hospital they had not till then entered, Clara suddenly started back with emotion and turned deadly pale. But for Major Purling’s support she would have fallen. Tears came to her relief, and she rallied.
What was the matter?
On one of the iron beds lay a captain of artillery. He did not appear to be wounded. He lay, as if suffering more from exhaustion than from physical pain. And yet, on looking closer, you saw from the glassy unconsciousness of his eyes that the poor man was blind. But O that expression of sweet resignation and patient submission! It was better than a prayer to look on it. It touched deeper than any exhortation from holiest lips. It spoke of an inward reign of divinest repose; of a land more beautiful than any the external vision ever looked on; of that peace of God which passeth all understanding.
Clara recognized in it the face of CharlesCharles Kenrick. A cannon-ball had passed before his eyes, and the shock from the concussion of air had paralyzed the optic nerves. The surgeons gave him little hope of ever recovering his sight.
For some private reason, best known to herself, Clara did not make herself known to Kenrick. She did not even inform any one that she knew him. She induced Lucy Charlton to minister to his wants. On Lucy’s asking him what she could do (for she did not know he was Onslow’s friend), he said, “If you can pen a letter for me, I shall be much obliged.”
“Certainly,” said she; “and my friend here shall hold the ink while I write.”
She received from the hands of her maid in attendance a portfolio with which she had come provided, anticipating such requests. She then took a seat by his side, while Clara sat at the foot of the cot, where she could look in his blind, unconscious face, and wipe away her tears unseen.
“I’m ready,” said Lucy. And he dictated as follows:—
“My dear Cousin: I received last night your letter from Meade’s headquarters. ’T was a comfort to be assured you escaped unharmed amid your many exposures.
“You tell me I am put down in the reports as among the slightly wounded, and you desire to know all the particulars. Alas! I may say with the tragic poet, ‘My wound is great because it is so small.’ Don’t add, as Johnson once did, ‘Then ‘t would be greater, were it none at all.’ A cannon-ball, my dear fellow, passed before my eyes, and the sight thereof is extinguished utterly. The handwriting of this letter, you will perceive, is not my own.
“What you say of Onslow delights me. So he has behaved nobly before Vicksburg, and is to be made a Colonel! The one hope of his heart is to be with the army of liberation that shall go down into Texas. Onslow will not rest till he has redeemed that bloody soil to freedom, and put an end to the rule of the miscreant hangmen of the State.
“I said the one hope of his heart. But what you insinuate leads me to suspect there may be still another,—a tender hope. Can it be? Poor fellow! He deserves it.
“You bid me take courage and call on Perdita. You tell me she is free as air,—that the bloom is on the plum as yet untouched, unbreathed upon. My own dear cousin, if I was hopeless before I lost my eyesight, what must I be now? But, since a thing of beauty is a joy forever, was I not lucky in making her acquaintance before that cannon-ball swept away my optic sense? Now, as I rest here on my couch, I can call up her charming image,—nay, I can hear the very tones of her singing. She is worthy of the brilliant inheritance you were instrumental in restoring to her. I shall always be the happier for having known her, even though the knowing should continue to be my disquietude.
“I have just heard from my father. He and his young wife are in Richmond. His pecuniary fortunes are at a very low ebb. His slaves were all liberated last month by Banks, who has anticipated the work I expected to do myself. My father begins to be disenchanted in regard to the Rebellion. He even admits that Davis isn’t quite so remarkable a man as he had supposed. How gladly I would help my father if I could! May the opportunity be some day mine. All I have (’t is only five thousand dollars) shall be his.
“What can I do, my dear cousin, if I can’t get back my eyesight? God knows and cares; and I am content in that belief. ‘There is a special providence in the falling of a sparrow.’ Am not I better than many sparrows? ‘Hence have I genial seasons!’ ’T is all as it should be; and though He slay me, yet will I trust in him.
“To William C. Vance.”
Several times during the dictating of this letter, Lucy (especially when Onslow’s name was mentioned) would have betrayed both herself and Clara, had not the latter in dumb show dissuaded her. The next day Clara made herself known, and introduced Major Purling; but she did not allow the blind man to suspect that she was that friend of his unknown amanuensis, who had “held the ink.”
Her own persuasions, added to those of the Major, forced Kenrick at last to consent to be removed to Onarock. Here, in the society of cheerful Old Age and congenial Youth, he rapidly recovered strength. But to his visual orbs there returned no light. There it was still “dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.”
He did not murmur at the dispensation. In all Clara’s studies, readings, and exercises he was made the partaker. Even the beautiful landscapes on all sides were brought vividly before his inner eyes by her graphic words. Along the river’s bank, and through the forest aisles, and along the garden borders she would lead him, and not a flower was beautiful that he was not made to know it.
It was the 18th of October, 1863,—that lovely Sabbath which seemed to have come down out of heaven,—so beautiful it was,—so calm, so bright,—so soft and yet so exhilarating. The forest-trees had begun to put on their autumnal drapery of many colors. The maple was already of a fiery scarlet; the beech-leaves, the birch, and the witch-hazel, of a pale yellow; and there were all gradations of purple and orange among the hickories, the elms, and the ashes. The varnished leaves of the oak for the most part retained their greenness, forming mirrors for the light to reflect from, and flashing and glistening, as if for very joy, under the bland, indolent breeze. It was such weather as this that drew from Emerson that note, we can all respond to, in our higher moments of intenser life, “Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
With Kenrick, even to his blindness there came a sense of the beauty and the glow. He could enjoy the balmy air, the blest power of sunshine, the odors from the falling leaves and the grateful earth. And what need of external vision, since Clara could so well supply its want? He walked forth with her, and they stopped near a rustic bench overlooking the Hudson, and sat down.
“Indeed I must leave you to-morrow,” said he, in continuation of some previous remark: “I’ve got an excellent situation as sub-teacher of French at West Point.”
“O, you’ve got a situation, have you?” returned Clara.
The tears sprang to her eyes; but, alas for human frailty! this time they were tears of vexation.
There was silence for almost a minute. Then Kenrick said, “Do you know I’ve been with you more than three months?”
“Well,” replied Clara, pettishly, “is there anything so very surprising or disagreeable in that?”
“But I fear Onarock will prove my Capua,—that it will unfit me for the sterner warfare of life.”
“O, go to your sterner warfare, since you desire it!”
And with a desperate effort at nonchalance she swung her hat by its ribbon, and sang that little air from “La Bayadère” by Auber,—“Je suis content,—je suis heureux.”
“Clara, dear friend, you seem displeased with me. What have I done?”
“You want to humiliate me!” exclaimed Clara, reproachfully, and bursting into a passion of tears.
“Want to humiliate you? I can’t see how.”
“I suppose not,” returned Clara, ironically. “There are none so blind as those who don’t choose to see.”
“What do you mean, dear friend?”
“Dear friend indeed!” sobbed Clara. “Is he as blind as he would have me think? Haven’t I given hints enough, intimations enough, opportunities enough? Would the man force me to offer myself outright?”
There was another interval of silence, and this time it lasted full ten minutes. And then Kenrick, his breath coming quick, his breast heaving, unable longer to keep back his tears, drew forth his handkerchief, and covering his face, wept heartily.
He rose and put out his hand. Clara seized it. He folded her in his arms; and their first kiss,—a kiss of betrothal,—was exchanged.
1. Having slept under Toussaint’s roof, and seen him often, the writer can testify to the accuracy of this sketch of one of the most thorough gentlemen in bearing and in heart that he ever knew.
2. A fact. The incident, which occurred literally as related (on Bob Myers’s plantation in Alabama), was communicated to the writer by an eye-witness, a respectable citizen of Boston, once resident at the South. The murder, of course, passed not only unpunished, but unnoticed.
3. See James Sterling’s “Letters from the Slave States.”
4. This last paragraph embodies the actual words of Mr. Sterling, published in 1856.
5. Similar occurrences are related by Cotton Mather to have taken place in Boston in 1693. Six witnesses, whose affidavits he gives, namely, Samuel Aves, Robert Earle, John Wilkins, Dan Williams, Thomas Thornton, and William Hudson, testify to having repeatedly seen Margaret Rule lifted from her bed up near to the ceiling by an invisible force. It is a cheap way of getting rid of such testimony to say that the witnesses were false or incompetent. The present writer could name at least six witnesses of his own acquaintance now living, gentlemen of character, intelligence, sound senses and sound judgment, who will testify to having seen similar occurrences. The other phenomena, related as witnessed by Peek, are such as hundreds of intelligent men and women in the United States will confirm by their testimony. Indeed, the number of believers in these phenomena may be now fairly reckoned at more than three million.
6. There are thousands of intelligent persons in the United States who will testify to the fact of spirit touch. The writer has on several occasions felt, though he has not seen, a live hand, guided by intelligence, that he was fully convinced belonged to no mortal person present. The conditions were such as to debar trick or deception. There are several trustworthy witnesses, whom the writer could name, who have both seen and felt the phenomenon, and tested it as thoroughly as Peek is represented to have done.
7. The phenomenon of stigmata appearing on the flesh of impressible mediums is one of the most common of the manifestations of modern Spiritualism. Sometimes written words and sometimes outline representations of objects appear, under circumstances that make deception impossible. The writer has often witnessed them. St. Francis, and many other saints of the Catholic Church, were the subjects of similar phenomena. The late Earl of Shrewsbury, a Catholic nobleman, has published a long account of their occurrence during the present century. The Catholic Church has been always true to the doctrine of the miraculous.
8. Author of “The Uprising of a Great People,” “America before Europe,” &c.; also of two large volumes on Modern Spiritualism.
9. See Alexander Humboldt’s Letters to Varnhagen.
10. See Edouard Laboulaye, “De la Personnalité Divine.”
11. Tertullian, a devout Christian, when he wrote the following, would seem to have believed there could be no spirit independent of substance and form: “Nihil enim, si non corpus. Omne quod est, corpus est sui generis; nihil est incorporale, nisi quod non est. Quis enim negabit Deum corpus esse, etsi Deus spiritus est? Spiritus enim corpus sui generis, sua effigie;”—“For there is nothing, if not body. All that is, is body after its kind; nothing is incorporeal except what is not. For who will deny God to be body, albeit God is spirit? For spirit is body of its proper kind, in its proper effigy.” These views are not inconsistent with those entertained by many modern Spiritualists.
12. In a work published in London by De Foe, in 1722, one of his characters speaks of the Virginia immigration as being composed either of “first, such as were brought over by masters of ships, to be sold as servants; or, second, such as are transported, after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death.”
13. These passages are from a speech of President Davis at Jackson, Miss., December, 1862. When he gets in a passion, Mr. Davis repudiates the truth even as he would State debts. Notorious facts of history are set aside in his blind wrath. The colonists of New England, he well knows, were the friends and compatriots of Cromwell and his Parliament; and the few prisoners of war Cromwell sent over from Ireland and England as slaves did not constitute an appreciable part of the then resident population of the North. It is a well-known fact, which no genealogist will dispute, that not Virginia, nor any other American State, can show such a purely English ancestry as Massachusetts. The writer of a paper in the New York Continental Monthly for July, 1863, under the title of “The Cavalier Theory Refuted,” proves this statistically. “Let it be avowed,” he says, “that Puritanic New England could always display a greater array of gentlemen by birth than Virginia, or even the entire South. This is said deliberately, because we know whereof we speak.” He gives figures and names. And yet even so judicious a writer as John Stuart Mill has fallen into the error of supposing that the South had the advantage of the North in this respect. The anxious and persistent clamor of the Secessionists on this point, in the hope to enlist the sympathy of the British aristocracy, has not been wholly without effect. We would only remark, in conclusion, that Davis and his brethren, in their over-anxiety to prove that their ancestors were gentlemen, and ours clodhoppers, show the genuine spirit of the upstart and the parvenu. The true gentleman is content to have his gentility appear in his acts.
Mr. Clay of the Confederate Congress has introduced a resolution proposing that the coat of arms of the Slave Confederacy shall be the figure of a cavalier! Would not a beggar on horseback, riding in a certain familiar direction, be more appropriate?
14. It afterwards appeared that the Vicksburg “gentlemen,” impatient at their want of success, selected a man who came nearest to the description of Gashface, shot him, and then marked his body in a way to satisfy the expectations of those who had formed an imaginative idea of the personal peculiarities that would identify the celebrated liberator, so long the terror of masters on the Mississippi.
15. Afterwards the notorious proslavery guerilla leader in Virginia.
16. The dishonesty of Mr. John Slidell’s attempt to expunge from Davis’s history the reproach of repudiation is thoroughly and irrefutably exposed by Mr. Robert J. Walker in the Continental Monthly, 1863.
17. This prediction was merely one among many hundred such which every reader of newspapers will remember.
18. We subjoin one of the various translations:—
19. The line is from the following prayer, attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots:—
20. Some of these note-books have been brought to light by the civil war, and a quotation from one of them will be found on another page of this work.
21. Should any person question the probability of the incidents in Vance’s narrative, we would refer him to the “Letter to Thomas Carlyle” in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1863. On page 501, we find the following: “Within the past year, a document has come into my hands. It is the private diary of a most eminent and respectable slaveholder, recently deceased. The chances of war threw it into the hands of our troops.... One item I must have the courage to suggest more definitely. Having bidden a young slave-girl (whose name, age, color, &c., with the shameless precision that marks the entire document, are given) to attend upon his brutal pleasure, and she silently remaining away, he writes, ‘Next morning ordered her a dozen lashes for disobedience.’” In a foot-note to the above we are assured by Messrs. Ticknor and Fields that the author of the letter is “one whose word is not and cannot be called in question; and he pledges his word that the above is exact and proven fact.”
22. “O no, madam, for then I shall be too black.” A Life of Toussaint, by Mrs. George Lee, was published in Boston some years since.
23. By Dsheladeddin, a famous Mahometan mystic.
24. On the contrary, Mrs. Kemble says they are cruelly treated, and that the forms of suffering are “manifold and terrible” in consequence.
25. The Savannah River Baptist Association of Ministers decreed (1836) that the slave, sold at a distance from his home, was not to be countenanced by the church in resisting his master’s will that he should take a new wife.
26.
27. General Ullmann writes from New Orleans, June 6, 1863, to Governor Andrew: “Every man (freed negro) presenting himself to be recruited, strips to the skin. My surgeons report to me that not one in fifteen is free from marks of severe lashing. More than one half are rejected because of disability from lashing with whips, and the biting of dogs on calves and thighs. It is frightful. Hundreds have welts on their backs as large as one of your largest fingers.”
28. Abercrombie relates an authenticated case of the same kind. A woodman, while employed with his axe, was hit on the head by a falling tree. He remained in a semi-comatose state for a whole year. On being trepanned, he uttered an exclamation which was found to be the completion of the sentence he had been in the act of uttering when struck twelve months before.
29. Among the foul records the Rebellion has unearthed is one, found at Alexandria, La., being a stray leaf from the diary of an overseer in that vicinity, in the year 1847. It chronicles the whippings of slaves from April 20 to May 21. Of thirty-nine whippings during that period, nineteen were of females. We give a few extracts from this precious and authentic document:—
“April 20. Whipped Adam for cutting cotton too wide. Nat, for thinning cotton.—21. Adaline and Clem, for being behind.—24. Esther, for leaving child out in yard to let it cry.—27. Adaline, for being slow getting out of quarters.—28. Daniel, for not having cobs taken out of horse-trough.—May 1. Anna, Jo, Hannah, Sarah, Jim, and Jane, for not thinning corn right. Clem, for being too long thinning one row of corn. Esther, for not being out of quarters quick enough.—10. Adaline, for being last one out with row.—15. Esther, for leaving grass in cotton.—17. Peggy, for not hoeing as much cane as she ought to last week.—18. Polly, for not hoeing faster.—20. Martha. Esther, and Sarah, for jawing about row, while I was gone.—21. Polly, for not handling her hoe faster.”
A United States officer from Cambridge, Mass., sent home this stray leaf, and it was originally published in the Cambridge Chronicle.
30. See Chapter XII. page 112.
31. The names and the facts are real. See Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1868.
32. Mr. W.S. Grayson of Mississippi writes, in De Bow’s Review (August, 1860): “Civil liberty has been the theme of praise among men, and most wrongfully. This is the infatuation of our age.” And Mr. George Fitzhugh of Virginia writes: “Men are never efficient in military matters, or in industrial pursuits, until wholly deprived of their liberty. Loss of liberty is no disgrace.”
33. Testimony of Mrs. Fanny Kemble to facts within her knowledge.
34. Late member of Congress from Texas. In his speech in New York (1862) he said: “I know that the loyalists of Texas have died deaths not heard of since the dark ages until now; not only hunted and shot, murdered upon their own thresholds, but tied up and scalded to death with boiling water; torn asunder by wild horses fastened to their feet; whole neighborhoods of men exterminated, and their wives and children driven away.”
It is estimated by a writer in the New Orleans Crescent (June, 1863), that at least twenty-five hundred persons had been hung in Texas during the preceding two years for fidelity to the Union.
The San Antonio (Texas) Herald, a Rebel sheet of November 13th, 1862, taunted the Unionists with the havoc that had been made among them! It says: “They (Union men) are known and will be remembered. Their numbers were small at first, and they are becoming every day less. In the mountains near Fort Clark and along the Rio Grande their bones are bleaching in the sun, and in the counties of Wire and Denton their bodies are suspended by scores from black-jacks.”
Such are the shameless butchers and hangmen that Slavery spawns!
35. “Marriage,” says a Catholic Bishop of a Southern State, quoted in the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph, “is scarcely known amongst them (the slaves); the masters attach no importance to it. In some States those who teach them (the slaves) to read are punished with death.”
36. Our experience in South Carolina and Louisiana proves that there would be no danger, but, on the contrary, great good in instant emancipation.
37. The writer has fully tested it in repeated instances; and there are probably several hundred thousand persons at this moment in the United States, to whom the same species of test is a certainty, not merely a belief.
38. The parallel facts are too numerous and notorious to need specification.
39. Captain Andre Cailloux, a negro, was a well-educated and accomplished gentleman. He belonged to the First Louisiana regiment, and perished nobly at Port Hudson, May 17, 1863, leading on his men in the thickest of the fight. His body was recovered the latter part of July, and interred with great ceremony at New Orleans.
40. The actual definition given by E. A., one of the Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend’s mesmerized subjects.
41. Mr. Davis’s father was a “cavalier.” He dealt in horses.
42. “Reverently, we feel that our Confederacy is a God-sent missionary to the nations, with great truths to preach.”—Richmond Enquirer.
43. This yoke was on exhibition several months at Williams and Everett’s, Washington Street, Boston, it having been sent by Governor Andrew with a letter, the original of which we have before us while we write. It bears date September 10th, 1863. It says of this yoke (which we have held in our hands), that it “was cut from the neck of a slave girl” who had worn it “for three weary months. An officer of Massachusetts Volunteers, whose letter I enclose to you, sent me this memento,” &c. That officer’s original letter, signed S. Tyler Read, Captain Third Massachusetts Cavalry, is also before us. He writes to the Governor of Massachusetts, that, having been sent with a detachment of troops down the river to search suspected premises on the plantation of Madame Coutreil, his attention was attracted by a small house, closed tightly, and about nine or ten feet square. “I demanded,” writes Captain Read, “the keys, and after unlocking double doors found myself in the entrance of a dark and loathsome dungeon. ‘In Heaven’s name, what have you here?’ I exclaimed to the slave mistress. ‘O, only a little girly—she runned away!’ I peered into the darkness, and was able to discover, sitting at one end of the room upon a low stool, a girl about eighteen years of age. She had this iron torture riveted about her neck, where it had rusted through the skin, and lay corroding apparently upon the flesh. Her head was bowed upon her hands, and she was almost insensible from emaciation and immersion in the foul air of her dungeon. She was quite white.... I had the girl taken to the city, where this torture was removed from her neck by a blacksmith, who cut the rivet, and she was subsequently made free by military authority.”
See in the Atlantic Monthly (July, 1863) a paper entitled “Our General,” from the pen of one who served as Deputy Provost Marshal in New Orleans. His facts are corroborated both by General Butler and Governor Shepley, who took pains to authenticate them. A girl, “a perfect blonde, her hair of a very pretty, light shade of brown, and perfectly straight,” had been publicly whipped by her master (who was also her father), and then “forced to marry a colored man.” We spare our readers the mention of the most loathsome fact in the narrative.
Another case is stated by the same writer. A mulatto girl, the slave of one Landry, was brought to General Butler. She had been brutally scourged by her master. He confessed to the castigation, but pleaded that she had tried to get her freedom. The poor girl’s back had been flayed “until the quivering flesh resembled a fresh beefsteak scorched on a gridiron.” It was declared by influential citizens, who interceded for him, that Landry was (we quote the recorded words) “not only a high-toned gentleman, but a person of unusual amiability of character.” General Butler freed the girl, and compelled the high-toned Landry to pay over to her the sum of five hundred dollars.
44. Actual words of a negro preacher, taken down on the spot by a hearer.
45. If there is divination (clairvoyance), there must be gods (spirits).
46. See Mr. Jefferson Davis’s proclamation for a fast, March, 1863.
47. These quotations are genuine, as many newspaper readers will recollect.