University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
The effect of the pamphlet on its reader and hearers.

We had seen the last day of content on Ridgewood
Hill. That little scrap of paper, thrown
among us perhaps by accident, or, as I have sometimes
thought, dropped by the fiend of darkness
himself, had conjured up a thousand of his imps,
who, one after another, took up their dwelling in
our breasts, until their name was Legion. My
fellow-slaves cared little now for singing and dancing.
Their only desire, in the intervals of labour,
was to assemble together below the bluff, and dive
deeper into the mysteries of the pamphlet; and as I
was the only one who could explain them, and was
ready enough to do so, I often neglected my little
friend Tommy to preside over their convocations.

Nor were these meetings confined to the original
finders of the precious document. The news
had been whispered from man to man, and the sensation
spread over the whole estate, so that those
who lived with the major were as eager to escape
from their labours and listen to the new revelation
as ourselves. Nay, so great was the curiosity
among them, that many who could not come when
I was present to expound the secrets of the book,
would betake themselves to the bluff, to indulge a

look at it, and guess out its contents as they could
from the pictures. And by-and-by, the news having
spread to a distance, we had visiters also from
the gangs of other plantations.

It was perhaps a week or more before the composition
was read through and understood by us
all; and in that time it had wrought a revolution
in our feelings as surprising as it was fearful. And
now, lest the reader should doubt that the great effects
I am about to record should have really arisen
from so slight a cause as a little book, I think it
proper to tell him more fully than I have done what
that little book contained.

It was, as I have said, an address to the owners of
slaves, and its object purported to be to awaken their
minds to the cruelty, injustice, and wickedness of
slavery. This was sought to be effected, in the first
place, by numerous cuts, representing all the cruelties
and indignities that negro slaves had suffered,
or could suffer, either in reality, or in the imaginations
of the philanthropists. Some of these were
horrible, many shocking, and all disgusting; and
some of them, I think, were copied out of Fox's
Book of Martyrs, though of that I am not certain.
The moral turpitude and illegality of the institution
were shown, or attempted to be shown, now by
arguments that were handled like daggers and
broad-axes, and now by savage denunciations of
the enslaver and oppressor, who were proved to be
murderers, blasphemers, tyrants, devils, and I know
not what beside. The vengeance of Heaven was

invoked upon their heads, coupled with predictions
of the retribution that would sooner or later
fall upon them, these being borne out by monitory
allusions to the servile wars of Rome, Syria, Egypt,
Sicily, St. Domingo, &c. &c. It was threatened
that Heaven would repeat the plagues of Egypt in
America, to punish the task-masters of the Ethiopian,
as it had punished those of the Israelite, and
that, in addition, the horrors of Hayti would be
enacted a second time, and within our own borders.
It was contended that the negro was, in organic
and mental structure, the white man's equal, if not
his superior, and that there was a peculiar injustice
in subjecting to bondage his race, which had been
(or so the writer averred), in the earlier days of the
world, the sole possessors of knowledge and civilization;
and there were many triumphant references
to Hannibal, Queen Sheba, Cleopatra, and the
Pharaohs, all of whom were proved to have been
woolly-headed, and as bright in spirit as they were
black in visage. In short, the book was full of
strange things, and, among others, of insurrection
and murder; though it is but charitable to suppose
that the writer did not know it.

There was scarce a word in it that did not contribute
to increase the evil spirit which its first
paragraph had excited among my companions. It
taught them to look on themselves as the victims
of avarice, the play-things of cruelty, the foot-balls
of oppression, the most injured people in the world:
and the original greatness of their race, which was

an idea they received with uncommon pleasure,
and its reviving grandeur in the liberated Hayti,
convinced them they possessed the power to redress
their wrongs, and raise themselves into a
mighty nation.

With the sense of injury came a thirst for revenge.
My companions began to talk of violence
and dream of blood. A week before there was not
one of them who would not have risked his life to
save his master's; the scene was now changed—
my master walked daily, though without knowing
it, among volcanoes; all looked upon him askant,
and muttered curses as he passed. A kinder-hearted
man and easier master never lived; and it
may seem incredible that he should be hated without
any real cause. Imaginary causes are, however,
always the most efficacious in exciting jealousy
and hatred, In affairs of the affections, slaves
and the members of political factions are equally
unreasonable. The only difference in the effect is,
that the one cannot, while the other can, and does,
change his masters when his whim changes.

That fatal book infected my own spirit as deeply
as it did those of the others, and made me as sour
and discontented as they. I began to have sentimental
notions about liberty and equality, the dignity
of man, the nobleness of freedom, and so-forth;
and a stupid ambition, a vague notion that I was
born to be a king or president, or some such great
personage, filled my imagination, and made me a
willing listener to, and sharer in, the schemes of

violence and desperation which my fellow-slaves
soon began to frame. It is wonderful, that among
the many thoughts that now crowded my brain, no
memory of my original condition arose to teach me
the folly of my desires. But, and I repeat it again,
the past was dead with me; I lived only for the
present.

A little incident that soon befell me will show the
reader how completely my feelings were identified
with my condition, and how deeply the lessons of
that unlucky pamphlet had sunk into my spirit.
My little playmate, master Tommy, who was not
above six years old, being of an irascible temper,
sometimes quarrelled with me; on which occasions,
as I mentioned before, he used to beat me;
a liberty I rather encouraged than otherwise, since
I gained by it—though my master strictly forbade
the youth to take it. Now, as soon as my head began
to fill with the direful and magnificent conceptions
of a malecontent and conspirator, I waxed
weary of child's play and master Tommy, who,
falling into a passion with me for that reason, proceeded,
on a certain occasion, to pommel my ribs
with a fist about equal in weight to the paw of a
gadfly. I was incensed, I may say enraged, at the
poor child, and repaid the violence by shaking him
almost to death. Indeed, I felt for a while as if I
could have killed him; and I know not whether I
might not have done it (for the devil had on the
sudden got into my spirit), had not his father discovered
what I was doing, and run to his assistance.

I then pretended that I had shaken him in sport,
and thus escaped a drubbing, of which I was at
first in danger. The threat of this, however, sank
deeply into my mind, and I ever after felt a deep
hatred of both father and son. This may well be
called a blind malice, for neither had given me any
real cause for it.