University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
DOCTOR RAVENEL COMMENCES THE ORGANIZALION OF
SOUTHERN LABOR.

For some time previous to the marriage Doctor Ravenel
had been plotting the benefit of the human race. He
was one of those philanthropic conspirators, those humanitarian
Catilines, who, for the last thirty years have been
rotten-egged and vilified at the North, tarred and feathered
and murdered at the South, under the name of abolitionists.
It is true that until lately he has been a silent
one, as you may infer from the fact that he was still in the
land of the living. If the hundred-headed hydra had
preached abolition in New Orleans previous to the advent
of Farragut and Butler, he would have had every one of
his skulls fractured within twenty-four hours after he had
commenced his ministry. Nobody could have met the
demands of such a mission except that gentleman of miraculous
vitality mentioned by Ariosto, who, as fast as he
was cut in pieces, picked himself up and grew together as
good as new.

The Doctor was chiefly intent at present upon inducing
the negroes to work as freemen, now that they were no
longer obliged to work as slaves. He talked a great deal

about his plan to various influential personages, and even
pressed it at department headquarters in a lengthy private
interview.

“You are right, sir,” said Authority, with suave dignity.
“It is a matter of great instant importance. It may become
a military necessity. Suppose we should have a
war with France, (I don't say, sir, that there is any danger
of it,) we might be cut off from the rest of the Union. Louisiana
would then have to live on her own resources, and feed
her own army. These negroes must be induced to work.
They must be put at it immediately; they must have their
hoes in the soil before six weeks are over; otherwise we
are in danger of a famine. I have arranged a plan, Doctor.
The provost-marshals are to pick up every unemployed
negro, give him his choice as to what plantation he
will work on, but see that he works somewhere. There is
to be a fixed rate of wages,—so much in clothes and so
much in rations. Select your plantation, my dear sir, and
I will see that it is assigned to you. You will then obtain
your laborers by making written application to the Superintendent
of Negro Labor.”

The Doctor was honestly and intelligently delighted.
He expressed his admiration of the commanding general's
motives and wisdom in such terms that the latter, high as
he was in position and mighty in authority, felt flattered.
You could not possibly talk with Ravenel for ten minutes
without thinking better of yourself than before; for, perceiving
that you had to do with a superior man, and that
he treated you with deference, you instinctively inferred
that you were not only a person but a personage. But
the compliments and air of respect which he accorded the
commanding general were not mere empty civilities, nor
well-bred courtesies, nor expressions of consideration for
place and authority. Ravenel's enthusiasm led him to believe
that, in finding a man who sympathised with him in
his pet project, he had found one of the greatest minds of
the age.

“At last,” he said to his daughter when he reached
home, “at last we are likely to see wise justice meted out
to these poor blacks.”

“Is the Major-General pleasant?” asked Lillie, with an
inconsequence which was somewhat characteristic of her.
She was more interested in learning how a great dignitary
looked and behaved than in hearing what were his opinions
on the subject of freemen's labor.

“I don't know that a major general is obliged to be pleasant,
at least not in war time,” answered the Doctor, a
little annoyed at the interruption to the train of his ideas.
“Yes, he is pleasant enough; in fact something too much
of deportment. He put me in mind of one of my adventures
among the Georgia Crackers. I had to put up for
the night in one of those miserable up-country log shanties
where you can study astronomy all night through the
chinks in the roof, and where the man and wife sleep one
side of you and the children and dogs on the other. The
family, it seems, had had a quarrel with a neighboring
family of superior pretensions, which had not yet culminated
in gouging or shooting. The eldest daughter, a
ragged girl of seventeen, described to me with great
gusto an encounter which had taken place between her
mother and the female chieftain of the hostile tribe. Said
she, “Miss Jones, she tried to come the dignerfied over
mar. But thar she found her beater. My mar is hell on
dignerty.”—Well, the Major-General runs rather too luxuriantly
to dignity. But his ideas on the subject of reorganizing
labor are excellent, and have my earnest respect
and approbation. I believe that under his administration
the negroes will be allowed and encouraged to take their
first certain step toward civilization. They are to receive
some remuneration,—not for the bygone centuries of forced
labor and oppression,—but for what they will do hereafter.”

“I don't see, papa, that they have been treated much
worse than they might expect,” responds Lillie, who, although

now a firm loyalist, has by no means become an
abolitionist.

“Perhaps not, my dear, perhaps not. They have no
doubt been better off in the Dahomey of America than
they would have been in the Dahomey of Africa; and certainly
they couldn't expect much from a Christianity whose
chief corner-stone was a hogshead of slave-grown sugar.
The negroes were not foolish enough to look for much
good in such a moral atrocity as that. They have put
their trust in the enemies of it; in Frémont a while ago,
and in Lincoln now. At present they do expect something.
They believe that `the year of jubilo am come.'
And so it is. Before this year closes, many of these poor
creatures will receive what they never did before—wages
for their labor. For the first time in their lives they will
be led to realize the idea of justice. Justice, honesty,
mercy, and nearly the whole list of Christian virtues, have
hitherto been empty names to them, having no practical
signification, and in fact utterly unknown to their minds
except as words that for some unexplained purpose had
been inserted in the Bible. How could they believe in
the things themselves? They never saw them practiced;
at least they never felt their influence. Of course they
were liars and hypocrites and thieves. All constituted
society lied to them by calling them men and treating
them as beasts; it played the hypocrite to them by preaching
to them the Christian virtues, and never itself practising
them; it played the thief by taking all the earnings of
their labor, except just enough to keep soul and body
together, so that they might labor more. Our consciences,
the conscience of the nation, will not be cleared when we
have merely freed the negroes. We must civilize and
Christianize them. And we must begin this by teaching
them the great elementary duty of man in life—that of
working for his own subsistence. I am so interested in
the problem that I have resolved to devote myself personally
to its solution.”

“What! And give up your hospital?”

“Yes, my dear. I have already given it up, and got my
plantation assigned to me.”

“Oh, papa! Where?”

Of course Lillie feared that in her new home she might
not be able to see her husband; and of course the Doctor
divined this charming anxiety, and hastened to relieve her
from it.

“It is at Taylorsville, my dear. Taylorsville forms a
part of Colonel Carter's military jurisdiction, and the fort
there is garrisoned by a detachment from his brigade. He
can come to see us without neglecting his duties.”

Lillie colored, and said nothing for a few minutes. She
was so unused as yet to her husband, that the thought of
being visited by him thrilled her nerves, and took temporary
possession of all her mind.

“But, papa,” she presently inquired, “will this support
you as well as the hospital?”

“I don't know, child. It is an experiment. It may be
a failure, and it may be a pecuniary success. We shall
certainly be obliged to economize until our autumn crops
are gathered. But I am willing to do that, if I meet with
no other reward than my own consciousness that I enter
upon the task for the sake of a long oppressed race. I believe
that by means of kindness and justice I can give them
such ideas of industry and other social virtues as they
could not obtain, and have not obtained, from centuries of
robbery and cruelty.”

Lillie was lost in meditation, not concerning the good
of the blacks, but concerning the probable visits of Colonel
Carter at Taylorsville. Affectionately selfish woman as
she was, she would not have given up the alarming joy of
one of those anticipated interviews for the chance of civilizing
a capering wilderness of negroes.

Taylorsville, a flourishing village before the war, is situated
on the Mississippi just where it is tapped by Bayou
Rouge, which is one of the dozen channels through which

the Father of Waters finds the Gulf of Mexico. It is on
the western bank of the river, and for the most part on the
southern bank of the bayou; and is protected from both
by that continuous system of levees which alone saves
southern Louisiana from yearly inundations. At the time
of which I speak, a large portion of the town consisted of
charred and smoke-blackened ruins. Its citizens had been
mad enough to fire on our fleet, and Farragut had swept
it with his iron besoms of destruction. On the same bank
of the Mississippi, but on the northern bank of the bayou,
at the apex of the angle formed by the diverging currents,
is Fort Winthrop, a small star-shaped earth-work, faced
in part with bricks, surrounded by a ditch except on the
river side, and provided with neither casemate nor bomb-proof.
Ordered by Butler and designed by Weitzel, it
had been thrown up shortly after the little victory of
Georgia Landing. It was to be within reach of this fort
in case of an attack from raiding rebels, that Ravenel had
selected a plantation for his philanthropic experiment in
the neighborhood of Taylorsville. Haste was necessary to
success, for the planting season was slipping away.
Within a week or so after the marriage he had bought a
stock of tools and provisions, obtained a ragged corps of
negroes from the Superintendent of Colored Labor, shipped
every thing on board a Government transport, and was on
the spot where he proposed to initiate the re-organization
of southern industry.

The plantation house was a large, plain wooden mansion,
very much like those which the country gentility of
New England built about the beginning of this century,
except that the necessities of a southern climate had dictated
a spacious veranda covering the whole front, two
stories in height, and supported by tall square wooden
pillars. In the rear was a one-storied wing, containing
the kitchen, and rooms for servants. Farther back, at the
extremity of a deep and slovenly yard, where pigs had
been wont to wander without much opposition, was a hollow

square of cabins for the field-hands, each consisting of
two rooms, and all alike built of rough boards coarsely
whitewashed. Neither the cabins nor the family mansion
had a cellar, nor even a foundation wall; they stood on
props of brick-work, leaving room underneath for the free
circulation of air, dogs, pigs and pickaninnies. On either
side of the house the cleared lands ran a considerable distance
up and down the bayou, closing in the rear, at a
depth of three or four hundred yards, in a stretch of forest.
An eighth of a mile away, not far from the winding
road which skirted the sinuous base of the levee, was the
most expensive building of the plantation, the great brick
sugar-house, with vast expanses of black roof and a gigantic
chimney. No smoke of industry arose from it; the
sound of the grinding of the costly steam machinery had
departed; the vats were empty and dry, or had been carried
away for bunks and fire-wood by foraging soldiers and
negroes.

There was not a soul in any of the buildings or about
the grounds when the Ravenels arrived. The Secessionist
family of Robertson had fled before Weitzel's advance into
the Lafourche country, and its chief, a man of fifty,
had fallen at the head of a company of militia at the
fight at Georgia Landing. Then the field-hands, who had
hid in the swamps to avoid being carried to Texas, came
upon the house like locusts of destruction, broke down its
doors, shattered its windows, plundered it from parlor to
garret, drank themselves drunk on the venerable treasures
of the wine closet, and diverted themselves with soiling
the carpets, breaking the chairs, ripping up the sofas,
and defacing the family portraits. Some gentle sentiment,
perhaps a feeble love for the departed young “missus,”
perhaps the passion of their race for music, had deterred
them from injuring the piano, which was almost the only
unharmed piece of furniture in the once handsome parlor.
The single living creature about the place was a half-starved
grimalkin, who caterwauled dolefully at the visitors

from a distance, and could not be enticed to approach
by the blandishments of Lillie, an enthusiastic cat-fancier.
To the merely sentimental observer it was sad to think
that this house of desolation had not long since been the
abode of the generous family life and prodigal hospitality
of a southern planter.

“Oh, how doleful it looks!” sighed Lillie, as she wandered
about the deserted rooms.

“It is doleful,” said the Doctor. “As doleful as the
ruins of Babylon—of cities accursed of God, and smitten
for their wickedness. My old friend Elderkin used to say
(before he went addled about southern rights) that he
wondered God didn't strike all the sugar planters of Louisiana
dead. Well He has stricken them with stark madness;
and under the influence of it they are getting themselves
killed off as fast as possible. It was time. The
world had got to be too intelligent for them. They could
not live without retarding the progress of civilization.
They wanted to keep up the social systems of the middle
ages amidst railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, patent reapers,
and under the noses of Humboldt, Leverrier, Lyell,
and Agassiz. Of course they must go to the wall. They
will be pinned up to it in terrorem, like exterminated
crows and chicken-hawks. The grand jury of future centuries
will bring in the verdict, `Served them right!' At
the same time one cannot help feeling a little human sympathy,
or at any rate a little poetic melancholy, on stepping
thus into the ruins of a family.”

Lillie, however, was not very sentimental about the departed
happiness of the Robertsons; she was planning how
to get the house ready for the expected visit of Colonel
Carter; in that channel for the present ran her poesy.

“But really, papa, we must go to work,” she said.
“The nineteenth century has turned out the Robertsons,
and put us in—but it has left these rooms awfully dirty,
and the furniture in a dreadful condition.”

In a few minutes she had her hat off, her dress pinned

up to keep it out of the dust, her sleeves rolled back to her
elbows, and was flying about with remarkable emphasis,
dragging broken chairs, etc., to the garret, and brooming
up such whirlwinds of dust, that the Doctor flew abroad
for refuge. What she could not do herself she set half a
dozen negroes, male and female, to doing. She was wild
with excitement and gayety, running about, ordering and
laughing like a threefold creature. It was delightful to
remember, in a sweet under-current of thought which
flowed gently beneath her external glee, that she was
working to welcome her husband, slaving for him, tiring
herself out for his dear sake. In a couple of hours she was
so weary that she had to fling herself on a settee in the
veranda, and rest, while the negroes continued the labor.
Women in general, I believe, love to work by spasms and
deliriums, doing, or making believe do, a vast deal while
they are at it, but dropping off presently into languor and
headache.

“Papa, we shall have five whole chairs,” she called.
“You can sit in one, I in another, and that will leave
three for Mr. Carter. Why don't you come and do something?
I have fagged myself half to death, and you
haven't done a thing but mope about with your hands behind
your back. Come in now, and go to work.”

“My dear, there are so many negroes in there that I
can't get in.”

“Then come up and talk to me,” commanded the young
lady, who had meant that all the while. “You needn't
think you can find any Smithites or Robinsonites. There
isn't a mineral in Louisiana, unless it is a brickbat. Do
come up here and talk to me. I can't scream to you all
the afternoon.”

“I am so glad you can't,” grinned papa, and strolled
obstinately away in the direction of the sugar-house. He
was studying the nature of the soil, and proposing to subject
it to a chemical analysis, in order to see if it could
not be made to produce as much corn to the acre as the

bottom lands of Ohio. Indian corn and sweet potatoes,
with a little seasoning of onions, beets, squashes, and
other kitchen garden vegetables, should be his only crop
that season. Also he would raise pigs and chickens by the
hundred, and perhaps three or four cows, if promising
calves could be obtained in the country. What New Orleans
wanted, and what the whole department would
stand in desperate need of, should a war break out with
France, was, not sugar, but corn and pork. All that summer
the possibility of a war with France was a prominent
topic of conversation in Louisiana, so that even the soldiers
talked in their rough way of “revelling in the halls
of the Montezumas, and filling their pockets with little
gold Jesuses.” As for making sugar, unless it might be
a hogshead or so for family consumption, it was out of the
question. It would cost twenty thousand dollars merely
to put the sugar-house and its machinery to rights—and
the Doctor had no such riches, nor any thing approaching
to it, this side of heaven. Nevertheless he was perfectly
happy in strolling about his unplanted estate, and revolving
his unfulfilled plans, agricultural and humanitarian.
He proposed to produce, not only a crop of corn and potatoes,
but a race of intelligent, industrious and virtuous
laborers. He would make himself analytically acquainted,
not only with the elements and possibilities of the soil, but
with those of the negro soul. By the way, I ought to
mention that he was not proprietor of the plantation, but
only a tenant of it to the United States, paying a rent
which for the first year was merely nominal, so anxious
was Authority to initiate successfully the grand experiment
of freedmen's labor.

When he returned to the house from a stroll of two
hours Lillie favored him with a good imitation of a sound
scolding. What did he mean by leaving her alone so,
without anybody to speak a word to? If he was going
to be always out in this way, they might as well live in
New Orleans where he would be fussing around his hospital

from morning till night. She was tired with overseeing
those stupid negroes and trying to make them set
the chairs and tables right side up.

“My dear, don't reproach them for being stupid,” said
Ravenel. “For nearly a century the whole power of our
great Republic, north and south, has been devoted to keeping
them stupid. Your own State has taken a demoniac
interest in this infernal labor. We mustn't quarrel with
our own deliberate productions. We wanted stupidity,
we have got it, and we must be contented with it. At least
for a while. It is your duty and mine to work patiently,
courteously and faithfully to undo the horrid results of a
century of selfishness. I shall expect you to teach all
these poor people to read.”

“Teach them to read! what, set up a nigger school!”

“Yes, you born barbarian,—and daughter of a born
barbarian,—for I felt that way myself once. I want you
in the first place to teach them, and yourself too, how to
spell negro with only one g. You must not add your
efforts to keep this abused race under a stigma of social
contempt. You must do what you can to elevate them in
sentiment and in knowledge.”

“But oh, what a labor! I would rather clean house
every day.”

“Not so very much of a labor—not so very much of a
labor,” insisted the Doctor. “Negro children are just as
intelligent as white children until they find out that they
are black. Now we will never tell them that they are
black; we will never hint to them that they are born our
inferiors. You will find them bright enough if you won't
knock them on the head. Why, you couldn't read yourself
till you were seven years old.”

“Because you didn't care to have me. I learned quick
enough when I set about it.”

“Just so. And that proves that it is not too late for
our people here to commence their education. Adults can
beat children at the alphabet.”

“But it is against the law, teaching them to read.”

The Doctor burst into a hearty laugh.

“The laws of Dahomey are abrogated,” said he.
“What a fossil you are! You remind me of my poor
doting old friend, Elderkin, who persists in declaring that
the invasion of Louisiana was a violation of the Constitution.”

By this time the dozen or so of negroes had brought the
neglected mansion to a habitable degree of cleanliness, and
decked out two or three rooms with what tags and amputated
fragments remained of the once fine furniture. A
chamber had been prepared for Lillie, and another for the
Doctor. A tea-table was set in a picnic sort of style, and
crowned with corn cake, fried pork, and roasted sweet potatoes.

“Are you not going to ask in our colored friends?” inquired
Lillie, mischievously.

“Why no. I don't see the logical necessity of it. I always
have claimed the right of selecting my own intimates.
I admit, however, that I have sat at table with
less respectable people in some of the most aristocratic
houses of New Orleans. Please to drop the satire and put
some sugar in my tea.”

“Mercy! there is no sugar on the table. The stupid
creatures! How can you wonder, papa, that I allow myself
to look down on them a little?”

“I don't believe it is possible to get all the virtues and
all the talents for nothing a year, or even for ten dollars a
month. I will try to induce the Major-General commanding
to come and wait on table for us. But I am really
afraid I sha'n't succeed. He is very busy. Meantime
suppose you should hint to one of the handmaidens, as
politely as you can, that I am accustomed to take sugar
in my tea.”

“Julia!” called Lillie to a mulatto girl of eighteen, who
just then entered from the kitchen. “You have given us
no sugar. How could you be so silly?”

“Don't!” expostulated the Doctor. “I never knew a
woman but scolded her servants, and I never knew a servant
but waited the worse for it. All that the good-natured
creature desired was to know what you wanted. It
didn't clear her head nor soften her heart a bit to call her
silly; nor would it have helped matters at all if you had
gone on to pelt her with all the hard names in the English
language. Be courteous, my dear, to everything that is
human. We owe that much of respect to the fact that
man is made in the image of his Maker. Politeness is a
part of piety.”

“When would Mr. Carter be able to visit them?” was
Lillie's next spoken idea. Papa really could not say, but
hoped very soon—whereupon he was immediately questioned
as to the reasons of his hope. Having no special reason
to allege, and being driven to admit that, after all, the
visit could not positively be counted upon, he was sharply
catechised as to why he thought Mr. Carter would not
come, to which he could only reply by denying he had
entertained such a thought. Then followed in rapid succession,
“Suppose the brigade leaves Thibodeaux, where
will it go to? Suppose General Banks attacks Port Hudson,
won't he be obliged to leave Colonel Carter to defend
the Lafourche Interior? Suppose the brigade is ordered
into the field, will it not, being the best brigade, be always
kept in reserve, out of the range of fire?”

“My dear child,” deprecated the hunted Doctor, “what
happy people those early Greeks must have been who were
descended from the immortal gods! They could ask their
papas all sorts of questions about the future, and get reliable
answers.”

“But I am so anxious!” said Lillie, dropping back in
her chair with a sob, and wiping away her tears with her
napkin.

“My poor dear little girl, you must try to keep up a
better courage,” urged papa in a compassionate tone
which only made the drops fall faster, so affecting is pity.

“Nothing has happened to him yet, and we have a right
to hope and pray that nothing will.”

“But something may,” was the persevering answer of
anxiety.

As soon as supper was over she hurried to her room,
locked the door, knelt on the bit of carpet by the bedside,
buried her face in the bed-clothes, and prayed a long time
with tears and sobs, that her husband, her own and dear
husband, might be kept from danger. She did not even
ask that he might be brought to her; it was enough if he
might only be delivered from the awful perils of battle;
in the humility of her earnestness and terror she had not
the face to require more. After a while she went down
stairs again with an expression of placid exhaustion, rendered
sweeter by a soft glory of religious trust, as the sunset
mellowness of our earthly atmosphere is rayed by
beams from a mightier world. Sitting on a stool at her
father's feet, and laying her head on his knee, she talked
in more cheerful tones of Carter, of their own prospects,
and then again of Carter—for ever of Carter.

“I will teach the negroes to read,” she said. “I will
try to do good—and to be good.”

She was thinking how she could best win the favor and
protection of Heaven for her husband. She would teach
the negroes for Carter's sake; she had not yet learned to
do it for Jesus Christ's sake. She was not a heathen; she
had received the same evangelical instruction that most
young Americans receive; she was perfectly well aware
of the doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works.
But no profound sorrow, no awful sense of helplessness
under the threatening of dangers to those whom she dearly
loved, had ever made these things matters of personal
experience and realizing belief.

When the Doctor called in the negroes at nine o'clock,
and read to them a chapter from the Bible, and a prayer,
Lillie joined in the devotions with an unusual sense of humility
and earnestness. In her own room, before going to

bed, she prayed again for Carter, and not for him only,
but for herself. Then she quickly fell asleep, for she was
young and very tired. How some elderly people, who
have learned to toss and count the hours till near morning,
envy these infants, whether of twenty months or twenty
years, who can so readily cast their sorrows into the
profound and tranquil ocean of slumber!