XVIII The Menace of Slave Insurrection
“Richmond, June 8th, 1847.
“Dear Effie,—It is past ten o’clock, and a rainy night. Just such a one as would make a comfortable bed and a sound snooze no mean objects of desire.
“George Moody, alias ‘The Irresistible,’ arrived this afternoon, and will leave in the morning, and I cannot let so good an opportunity of writing to you escape. I must scribble a brief epistle.
“The drive down from Powhatan was delightful. I found Mr. Belt extremely pleasant, full of anecdote, a great talker, yet, withal—as Mr. Miller had told me—a good listener. A very necessary qualification, by-the-way, for any one with whom I may chance to be in company.
“The first thing I heard when I reached home was tidings of that worst of bugbears to a Southern woman—an impending insurrection. A double guard was on duty at the capitol, and a detachment of military from the armory paraded the streets all night. I was, I confess, somewhat alarmed, and not a little startled, but gradually my fears wore away, and I slept as soundly that night as if no such thing were in agitation.
“‘Puss Sheppard was in to supper, and her parting salutation to us at going was: ‘Farewell! If I am alive in the morning I will come and see if you are!’
“The whole matter ended, like Mr. C.’s sermon—‘just where it began—viz., in nothing.’
“Richmond is rather dull at present. The Texas excitement has subsided almost entirely, and those who gave credence to the report of the insurrection are desirous to keep as still as possible.
“Morning.—I can write no more. I am sure your good-nature will acquit me of blame so far as matter, chirography, and quality go, when I tell you that I have written this partly by the light of a lamp which finally went out, self-extinguished for want of oil, and partly this morning, when I am suffering with a sick-headache. I feel more like going to bed than writing, but ‘The Unexceptionable’ is about to take his departure, and waits for this. Write soon and much. I will try to treat you better next time.”
There is much reading between the lines to be done for the right comprehension of that letter. My genre pictures of days that are no more would be incomplete were I to fail to touch upon the “worst of bugbears” I feigned to pass over lightly.
In the debate upon the abolition of slavery in my native State, lost by one vote in the Legislature of 1831-32, while Nat Turner’s insurrection was fresh in the public mind, John Randolph declared, “Whenever the fire-alarm rings in Richmond every mother clasps her baby closer to her breast.”
I cannot recollect when the whisper of the possibility of “Insurrection” (we needed not to specify of what kind) did not send a sick chill to my heart. The menace I here dismiss with a sentence or two was the most serious that had loomed upon my horizon. I could not trust myself to dwell upon it within the two days that had elapsed since my return from a vacation month in Powhatan. How keenly every circumstance attending it was bitten into my mind is proved by the distinctness of the etching preserved by a memory that has let many things of greater moment escape its hold.
My host, Mr. D., had come in to dinner the day before that set for my stage-journey back to town, with the pleasing intelligence that Mr. Lloyd Belt, a former citizen of Powhatan, but for twenty years a resident of Richmond, was “going down”—Richmond was always “down,” as London is “up” from every part of England—the next day, and would be glad to take me in his carriage. As I wrote to Effie, the drive was delightful. My courtly escort took as much pains to entertain me as if I had been a belle and a beauty, instead of an unformed school-girl. It was a way they had—those gentlemen of the Old School—of recognizing the woman in every baby-girl, and doing it honor.
It did not strike me as strange that Mr. Belt beguiled the thirty-mile journey with anecdote and disquisition. He was charming. I never thought that he was likewise condescending. I am quite as sure that the idea did not enter his knightly imagination.
As we drove leisurely up Main Street from the bridge, we noticed that groups of men stood on the street corners and in the doors of stores, chatting gravely, and, it would seem, confidentially.
“There must be news from the seat of war!” opined my companion.
The Mexican War was then in progress, and accompanying raids into the debatable territory of Texas kept public sentiment in a ferment.
My father and the rest of the family, with a couple of neighbors, were enjoying the cool of the day upon our front porch. He came down to the gate to assist me to alight. So did Mr. Strobia, our elderly next-door neighbor, and he handed me up the steps while my father lingered to thank my escort for bringing me safely home. In the joyous confusion of greetings, I had not observed that Mr. Belt was leaning down from the carriage to my father’s ear, and that both were very grave, until Puss Sheppard, like the rattlepate she was, whispered loudly to Mr. Strobia:
“I’m scared to death! What is the latest news? You men won’t tell us.”
“I have heard no news about anything or anybody!” ejaculated the old gentleman, testily and loudly, glancing over his shoulder at Gilbert, who had my trunk on his shoulder and was carrying it in at the side-gate. “Upon my soul, I haven’t!” And as she caught his arm and swung around to get the truth from his eyes, he bustled down the steps and so on home.
I had the tale in full by the time my bonnet was off. Mea, on one side, and Puss on the other, poured it forth in excited whispers, having closed “the chamber” door. Abolitionists had been at work among the negroes in Henrico and Hanover counties for weeks. There were indications of an organized conspiracy (in scope and detail so like the plot for which John Brown’s blood paid twelve years thereafter, that I bethought me of it when the news from Harper’s Ferry stunned the nation), and the city was under arms. Governor Smith was said to have issued a proclamation to militia and citizens at large in Latin.
I laughed there.
“‘Extra Billy!’ He knows less of Latin than of Choctaw!”
The worthy functionary had earned the sobriquet by superdiligence in the matter of extra baggage while in the service of a stage-coach company, and as he was a Democrat we never forgot it.
“Let that pass!” said Mea, impatiently. “We can’t get away from the fact that where there is so much smoke there must be a little fire. Some evil business is on foot, and all the servants know what it is, whether we do or not.”
I felt that she was right when Mary Anne and “Mammy,” Gilbert, Tom, his assistant, and my little maid Paulina, with black Molly, Percy’s nurse, trooped in, one after the other, to welcome “Miss Firginny” home. They had done the like ever since I was born. I should have felt hurt and angry had they failed in the ceremony. My sharpened senses detected something that was overdone in manner and speech. They were too glad to see me, and while they protested, I discerned sarcasm in their grins, a sinister roll in lively eyeballs.
We talked fast over the supper-table, and of all manner of things irrelevant to the topic uppermost in our thoughts. Once, while Gilbert and his half-grown subaltern were out of the room, I ventured a hasty whisper to my father, at whose right I sat:
“Father, have we any arms in the house if they should come?”
Without turning his head, he saw, out of the tail of his eye, Gilbert on the threshold, a plate of hot waffles in hand, and Tom at his heels bearing a pitcher of fresh water. My father reached out a deliberate hand for a slice of bread from a plate near his elbow.
“All that I have to say, my daughter” (his speech as deliberate as his hand, and every syllable sharp and clear), “is that we are prepared for them, come when and how they may.”
A perceptible shiver, as when one catches breath after an electric shock, ran around the table. All felt that he had thrown down the gauntlet, and was ready to take the consequences. My heart leaped up as an elastic bough from the weight that had bowed it to the earth. It was no effort after that to be gay. I told stories of my country sojourn, retailed the humors of the visit to our old neighborhood, mimicking this and that rustic, telling of comical sayings of the colored people who pressed me with queries as to town life—in short, unbottled a store of fun and gossip that lasted until bedtime. Then, as I told my correspondent, I went to bed and slept the sleep of youth, health, and an easy mind.
And this because he who never lied to me had said that he was “prepared” for the assassins, come when they might.
A week later, when the fireless smoke had vanished quite from the horizon, and we dared jest at the “scare,” I asked my mother what arsenal my father had had in reserve that he could speak so confidently of preparation for midnight attack and domestic treachery.
“Nothing more formidable than a carving-knife,” she answered, merrily, “and courage that has always served him in the hour of peril. He was not alarmed. I believe he would face a hundred negroes with no other weapon than his bare hands.”
I am often asked why, if our family servants were really and warmly attached to us, we should have let the “bugbear” poison our pleasures and haunt our midnight visions. To the present hour I am conscious of a peculiar stricture of the heart that stops my breath for a second, at the sudden blast of a hunter’s horn in the country. Before I was eight years old I had heard the tale of Gabriel’s projected insurrection, and of the bloodier outbreak of murderous fury led by Nat Turner, the petted favorite of a trusting master. Heard that the signal of attack in both cases was to be “a trumpet blown long and loud.” Again and again, on my visits to country plantations, I have been thrown into a paroxysm of terror when awakened from sleep in the dead of night, by the sound of the horns carried by “coon hunters” in their rounds of the woods nearest us. I could not have been over ten, when, on a visit to “Lethe,” a homestead occupied for a while by Uncle Carus, I was rambling in the garden soon after sunrise, picking roses, and let them fall from nerveless fingers at the ringing blast of a “trumpet blown long and loud”, from the brow of a neighboring hill. As it pealed louder and longer, until the blue welkin above me repeated the sound, I fled as fast as my freezing feet would carry me, to the deepest recesses of the graveyard at the foot of the garden, and hid in a tangle of wild raspberry bushes higher than my head. There I lay, wet with the dews of the past night, and my face and hands scratched to bleeding, until the winding horn grew faint and fainter, and the bay of a pack of hounds told me what a fool panic had made of me. We always thought of the graveyard as an asylum in the event of a rising. No negro would venture to enter it by day or night.
In any ordinary period of danger or distress, I would have trusted my life in the hands of the men and women who had been born on the same plantation with my mother, and the younger generation, to whom she had been a faithful and benignant friend from their cradles. In fire and flood and tempest; in good report and evil report; in sickness and in health; in poverty, as in riches—they would have stood with, and for us to the death. We knew them to be but children of a larger growth, passionate and unreasoning, facile and impulsive, and fanatical beyond anything conceivable by the full-blooded white. The superstitious savagery their ancestors had brought from barbarous and benighted Africa, was yet in their veins. We had heard how Gabriel, a leader in prayer-meetings, and encouraged by the whites to do Christian evangelization among his own race, had deliberately meditated and written down, as sections of the code to be put into practice, when he should come into his kingdom of Lower Virginia—a plan of murder of all male whites, and a partition of the women and girl-children among his followers, together with arson and tortures exceeding the deviltries of the red Indians. We had heard from the lips of eyewitnesses, scenes succeeding the Southampton massacre of every white within the reach of the murderous horde howling at the heels of the negro preacher whom his master had taught to read and write—how the first victim of the uprising, in the name of God and freedom, was that master as he lay asleep at his wife’s side. Of how coolly—even complacently—Turner recorded: “He sprang up, calling his wife’s name. It was his last word. A single blow was sufficient to kill him. We forgot a baby that was asleep in the cradle, but Hark went back and dispatched it.”
In every plan of rising against their masters, Religion was a potent element. It was, to their excitable imaginations, a veritable Holy War, from which there would be no discharge. The “Mammy” who had nursed her mistress’s baby at her own bosom, would brain it, with the milk yet wet upon its lips, if bidden by the “prophet” to make the sacrifice. Nat Turner split with his axe the skull of a boy he had carried in his arms scores of times, and stayed not his hand, although the little fellow met him with a happy laugh and outstretched arms and the cry, “Uncle Nat, you have come to give me a ride! Haven’t you?”
I repeat, we knew with what elements we should have to deal if the “rising” ever took an organized form. This ever-present knowledge lay at the root of the hatred of the “abolition movement.” To the Northerner, dwelling at ease among his own people, it was—except to the leaders—an abstract principle. “All men are created free and equal”—a slaveholder had written before his Northern brother emancipated his unprofitable serfs. Ergo, reasoned the Northern brother, in judicial survey of the increasing race, whose labor was still gainful to tobacco and wheat planter, the negro slave had a right to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
He did not count the cost of a consummation devoutly to be desired. He had no occasion to meditate upon the bloody steps by which the enslaved and alien race would climb to the height the Abolitionist would stimulate him to attain.
So well was it understood that a mother ran dangerous risks if she put her child into the care of the colored woman who complained that she “was tired of that sort of work,” that neglect of such dislike of a nurse’s duties was considered foolhardy. I heard a good old lady, who owned so many servants that she hired a dozen or so to her neighbors, lament that Mrs. Blank “did not mind what I told her about Frances’ determination not to take care of children. I hired the girl to her as a chambermaid, and gave her fair warning that she just would not be a nurse. A baby was born when Frances had been there four months, and she was set to nurse it. You must have heard the dreadful story? Perhaps you saw it in the papers. When the child was six months old the wretched creature pounded glass and put it in the baby’s milk. The child died, and the girl was hanged.”
Ugly stories, these, but so true in every particular that I cannot leave them out of my chronicle of real life and the workings of what we never thought, then, of calling “the peculiar institution.”
One of my most distinct recollections of the discussions of Slavery held in my hearing is that my saintly Aunt Betsy said, sadly and thoughtfully:
“One thing is certain—we will have to pay for the great sin of having them here. How, or when, God alone knows.”
“We did not bring them to Virginia!” was my mother’s answer. “And I, for one, wish they were all back in Africa. But what can we do, now that they are on our hands?”
Before turning to other and pleasanter themes, let me say that my father, after consultation with the wife who had brought to him eight or ten “family servants” as part of her father’s estate, resolved to free them and send them to Liberia at his own expense. This was in my early childhood, yet I recollect how the scheme failed through the obstinate refusal of the slaves to leave master, home, and country for freedom in a strange land. They clung to my mother’s knees, and prayed her, with wild weeping, not to let them go. They had blood relatives and dear friends here; their children had intermarried with men and women in different parts of the county; their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had left them no legacy of memories that would draw them toward the far-off country which was but the echo of an empty name to their descendants. They were comfortable and happy here. Why send them, for no fault of theirs, into exile?
“There is something in what they say!” my father had said to my mother, in reviewing the scene. “I cannot see that anything is left for us to do except to keep on as we are, and wait for further indications of the Divine will.”
This was in the thirties, not many years after an act of gradual emancipation was lost in the Legislature by the pitiful majority I named in an earlier paragraph. A score of years had passed since that momentous debate in our capitol, and our Urim and Thummin had not signified that we could do anything better than to “keep on as we were.”
It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.