University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.
A RETROSPECT.

BEFORE removing Peculiar from the closet which at
Charlton's bidding he has entered, we must go back to
the time when he was a slave, and amplify and illustrate certain
parts of his abridged narrative. His life, up to the period
when he comes upon our little stage, divides itself into three
eras, all marked by their separate moral experiences. In the
first, he felt the slave's crowning curse, — the absence of that
sense of personal responsibility which freedom alone can give;
and he fell into the demoralization which is the inherent consequence
of the slave's condition. In the second era, he encountered
his mother, and then the frozen fountain of his affections
was unsealed and melted. In the third, he met Corinna,
and for the first time looked on life with the eyes of belief.

It will seem idle to many advanced minds in this nineteenth
century to use words to show the wrong of slavery. Why not
as well spend breath in denouncing burglary or murder? But
slavery is still a power in the world. We are daily told it is
the proper status for the colored man in this country; that he
ought to covet slavery as much as a white man ought to covet
freedom. Besides, since Peek has confessed himself at one
time of his life a liar, we must show why he ought logically to
have been one.

To blame a slave for lying and stealing, is about as fair as it
would be to blame a man for using strategy in escaping from
an assassin. For the slaveholder, if not the assassin of the
slave's life, is the assassin of his liberty, his manhood, his moral
dignity.

Mr. Pugh of Ohio, Vallandigham's associate on the gubernatorial

ticket for 1863, presents his thesis thus: “When the
slaves are fit for freedom, they will be free.”

The profundity of this oracular proposition is only equalled
in the remark of the careful grandmother, who declared she
would never let a boy go into the water till he knew how to
swim.

“When the slaves are fit!” As if the road were clear for
them to achieve their fitness! Why, the slave is not only
robbed of his labor, but of his very chances as a thinking
being. Yes, with a charming consistency, the slavery barons,
the Hammonds and the Davises, while they tell us the negro
is unfitted for mental cultivation, institute the severest penal
laws against all attempts to teach the slave to read!

The first natural instinct of the slave, black or white, towards
his master is, to cheat and baffle that armed embodiment of
wrong, who stands to him in the relation of a thief and a tyrant.
Thus, from his earliest years, lying and fraud become
legitimate and praiseworthy in the slave's eyes; for slavery,
except under rare conditions, crushes out the moral life in the
victim.

Any conscience he may have, being subordinate to the conscience
of his master, is kept stunted or perverted. The slave
may wish to be true to his wife; but his master may compel
him to repudiate her and take another. He may object to
being the agent of an injustice; but the snap of the whip or
the revolver may be the reply to any conscientious scruples he
may offer against obedience.

In the first stage of his slave-life, Peculiar probably gave
little thought to the moral bearings of his lot; although old
Alva, his instructor, who was something of a casuist, had
offered him not a few hard nuts to crack in the way of knotty
questions. But Peculiar did precisely what you or I would
have done under similar circumstances: he taxed his ingenuity
to find how he could most safely shirk the tasks that were
put upon him. Knowing that his taskmasters had no right to
his labor, that they were, in fact, robbing him of what was his
own, he did what he could to fool and circumvent them. Thus
he grew to be, by a necessity of his condition, the most consummate
of hypocrites and the most intrepid and successful of

liars. At eighteen he was a match for Talleyrand in using
speech to conceal his thoughts.

He saw that, if slaves were well treated, it was because the
prudent master believed that good treatment would pay. Humanity
was gauged by considerations of cotton. Thus the very
kindnesses of a master had the taint of an intense selfishness;
and Peculiar, while readily availing himself of all indulgences,
correctly appreciated the spirit in which they were granted.

The devotional element seems to be especially active in the
negro; but it has little chance for rational development, dwarfed
and kept from the light as the intellect is. The uneducated slave,
like the Italian brigand, — indeed, like many worthy people who
go to church, — thinks it an impertinence to mix up morality
with religion. He agrees fully with the distinguished American
divine, who the other Sunday began his sermon with these
words, “Brethren, I am not here to teach you morality, but to
save your souls.” As if a saving faith could exist allied to a
corrupt morality!

Peculiar could not come in contact with a sham, however
solemn and pretentious, without applying to it the puncture
of his skeptical analysis. He saw his master, Herbert, go to
church on a Sunday and kneel in prayer, and on a Monday
shoot down Big Sam for attaching himself to the wrong woman.
He saw the Rev. Mr. Bloom take the murderer by the hand, as
if nothing had happened more tragical than the shooting of a
raccoon.

And then Peculiar cogitated, wondering what religion could
be, if its professors made such slight account of robbery and
murder. Was it the observance of certain forms for the propitiation
of an arbitrary, capricious, and unamiable Power, who
smiled on injustice and barbarity? The more he thought of it,
the more inexplicable grew the puzzle. Herbert evidently
regarded himself as one of the elect; and Mr. Bloom encouraged
him in his security. If heaven was to be won by
such kind of service as theirs, Peculiar concluded that he
would prefer taking his chances in hell; and so he became a
scoffer.

His residence in New Orleans, in enlarging the sphere of his
experiences, did not bring him the light that could quicken the

devotional part of his nature. Dwelling most of the time in
a hotel which frequently contained three or four hundred inmates,
he was thrown among white men of all grades, intellectual
and moral. He instinctively felt his superiority both ways
to not a few of these. It was therefore a swindling lie to say
that the blacks were born to be the thrall of the whites, that
slavery was the proper status of the black in this or any country.
If it were true that stupid blacks ought to be slaves,
so must it be true of the same order of whites.

He heard preachers stand up in their pulpits, and, like the
Rev. Dr. Palmer, blaspheme God by calling slavery a Divine
institution. “Would it have been tolerated so long, if it were
not?” they asked, with the confidence of a conjurer when he
means to hocus you. To which Peek might have answered,
“Would theft and murder have been tolerated so long, if they
were not equally Divine?” The Northern clergymen he encountered
held usually South-side views of the subject, and
so his prejudices against the cloth grew to be somewhat too
sweeping and indiscriminate. Judged of by its relations to
slavery, religion seemed to him an audacious system of impositions,
raised to fortify a lie and a wrong by claiming a Divine
sanction for merely human creeds and inventions.

This persuasion was deepened when he found there were
intelligent white men utterly incredulous as to a future state,
and that the people who went to church were many of them
practically, and many of them speculatively, infidels. The remaining
fraction might be, for all he knew, not only devout,
but good and just. Indeed, he had met some such, but they
could be almost counted on his ten fingers.

One day at the St. Charles he overheard a discussion between
Mr. James Sterling, an English traveller, and the Rev.
Dr. Manners of Virginia. Slaves are good listeners; and
Peculiar had sharpened his sense of hearing by the frequent
exercise of it under difficulties. He was an amateur in key-holes.
On this occasion he had only to open a ventilating
window at the top of a partition, and all that the disputants
might say would be for his benefit.

“Will you deny, sir,” asked the reverend Doctor, “that
slavery has the sanction of Scripture?”

“I exclude that inquiry as impertinent at present,” said
Sterling. “If Scripture authorized murder, then it would not
be murder that would be right, but Scripture that would be
wrong. And so in regard to slavery. On that particular
point Scripture must not be admitted as authoritative. It
cannot override the enlightened human conscience. It cannot
render null the deductions of science and of reason on a question
that manifestly comes within their sphere.”

“Ah! if you reject Scripture, then I have nothing more to
say,” retorted the Doctor. But, after a pause, he added,
“Have you not generally found the slaves well treated and
contented?”

“A system under which they are well treated and made content,”
replied Sterling, “is really the most to be deplored and
condemned. If slavery could so brutalize men's minds as to
make them hug their chains and glory in degradation, it would
be, in my eyes, doubly cursed. But it is not so; the slaves
are not happy, and I thank God for it. There is manhood
enough left in them to make them at least unhappy.”[1]

“You assume the equality of the races,” interposed the
Doctor.

“It is unnecessary for my argument to make any such assumption,”
said Sterling. “I have found that many black men
are superior to many white men, and some of those white men
slaveholders. I do not assume this. I know it. I have seen
it. But even if the black men were inferior, I hold, that man,
as man, is an end unto himself, and that to use him as a brute
means to the ends of other men is to outrage the laws of God.
I take my stand far above the question of happiness or unhappiness.
Have you noticed the young black man, called
Peek, who waits behind my chair at table?”

“Yes, a bright-looking lad. He anticipates your wants well.
You have feed him, I suppose?”

“I have given him nothing. I have put a few questions to
him, that is all; and what I have to say is, that he is superior
in respect to brains to nine tenths of the white youth who
suck juleps in your bar-rooms or kill time at your billiard-tables.”

“As soon as the Abolitionists will stop their infatuated clamor,”
replied the Doctor, “the condition of the slave will be
gradually improved, and we shall give more and more care to
his religious education.”

“So long as the negro is ruled by force,” returned Mr. Sterling,
“no forty-parson power of preaching can elevate his character.
It is a savage mockery to prate of duty to one in whom
we have emasculated all power of will. We cannot make a
moral intelligence of a being we use as a mere muscular force.”

“All that the South wants,” exclaimed the Doctor, “is to be
let alone in the matter of slavery. If there are any alleviations
in the system which can be safely applied, be sure they
will not be lacking as soon as we are let alone by the fanatics
of the North. Leave the solution of the problem to the intelligence
and humanity of the South.”

“Not while new cotton-lands pay so well! Be sure, reverend
sir, if the South cannot quickly find a solution of this slave
problem, God will find one for them, and that, trust me, will be
a violent one. American civilization and American slavery
can no longer exist together. One or the other must be destroyed.
For my part, I can't believe it to be the Divine
purpose that a remnant of barbarism shall overthrow the civilization
of a new world. Slavery must succumb.”[2]

“I recommend you, Mr. Sterling, not to raise your voice
quite so high when you touch upon these dangerous topics here
at the South. I will bid you good evening, sir.”