13. CHAPTER XIII.
FIRE UP!
“What is the end and essence of life? It is to expand all our faculties and affections.
It is to grow, to gain by exercise new energy, new intellect, new love. It is to hope, to
strive, to bring out what is within us, to press towards what is above us. In other
words, it is to be Free. Slavery is thus at war with the true life of human nature.”
—
Channing.
AT the conclusion of Vance's narrative, Mr. Onslow rose,
shook him by the hand, and walked away without making
a remark.
Mrs. Berwick showed her appreciation by her tears.
“What a pity,” said her husband, “that so fine a fellow as
Peek did not accept your proposal to free him!”
“Peek freed himself,” replied Vance. “He escaped to
Canada, married, settled in New York, and was living happily,
when a few days ago, rather than go before a United States
Commissioner, he surrendered himself to that representative
of the master race, Colonel Delancy Hyde, to whom you have
had the honor to be introduced. Peek is now on board this
boat, and handcuffed, lest he should jump overboard and swim
ashore. If you will walk forward, I will show him to you.”
Greatly surprised and interested, the Berwicks followed
Vance to the railing, and looked down on Peek as he reclined
in the sunshine reading a newspaper.
“But he must be freed. I will buy him,” said Berwick.
“Don't trouble yourself,” returned Vance. “Peek will be
free without money and without price, and he knows it. Those
iron wristbands you see are already filed apart.”
“Are there many such as he among the negroes?”
“Not many, I fear, either among blacks or whites,” replied
Vance. “But, considering their social deprivations, there are
more good men and true among the negroes — ay, among the
slaves — than you of the North imagine. Your ideal of the
negro is what you derive from the Ethiopian minstrels and
from the books and plays written to ridicule him. His type
is a low, ignorant trifler and buffoon, unfit to be other than a
slave or an outcast. Thus, by your injurious estimate, you lend
yourselves to the support and justification of slavery.”
“Would you admit the black to a social equality?”
“I would admit him,” replied Vance, “to all the civil rights
of the white. There are many men whom I am willing to acknowledge
my equals, whose society I may not covet. That
does not at all affect the question of their rights. Let us give
the black man a fair field. Let us not begin by declaring his
inferiority in capacity, and then anxiously strive to prevent his
finding a chance to prove our declaration untrue.”
“But would you favor the amalgamation of the races?”
“That is a question for physiologists; or, perhaps, for individual
instincts. Probably if all the slaves were emancipated
in all the Cotton States, amalgamation would be much less than
it is now. The French Quadroons are handsome and healthy,
and are believed to be more vigorous than either of the parent
races from which they are descended.”
“Many of the most strenuous opponents of emancipation
base their objections on their fears of amalgamation.”
“To which,” replied Vance, “I will reply in these words of
one of your Northern divines, `What a strange reason for oppressing
a race of fellow-beings, that if we restore them to their
rights we shall marry them!' Many of these men who cry out
the loudest against amalgamation keep colored mistresses, and
practically confute their own protests. To marriage, but not
to concubinage, they object.”
“I see no way for emancipation,” said Berwick, “except
through the consent of the Slave States.”
“God will find a way,” returned Vance. “He infatuates
before he destroys; and the infatuation which foreruns destruction
has seized upon the leading men of the South. Plagiarizing
from Satan, they have said to slavery, `Evil, be thou our
good!' They are bent on having a Southern Confederacy with
power to extend slavery through Mexico into Central America.
That can never be attempted without civil war, and civil war
will be the end of slavery.”
“Would you not,” asked Berwick, “compensate those masters
who are willing to emancipate their slaves?”
“I deny,” said Vance, “that property in slaves can morally
exist. No decision of the State can absolve me from the moral
law. It is a sham and a lie to say that man can hold property
in man. The right to make the black man a slave implies the
right to make you or me a slave. No legislation can make
such a claim valid. No vote of a majority can make an act of
tyranny right, — can convert an innocent man into a chattel.
All the world may cry out it is right, but they cannot make it
so. The slaveholder, in emancipating his slave, merely surrenders
what is not his own. I would be as liberal to him in
the way of encouragement as the public means would justify.
But the loss of the planter from emancipation is greatly over
estimated. His land would soon double in value by the act;
and the colored freedmen would be on the soil, candidates for
wages, and with incentives to labor they never had before.”
The bell for dinner broke in upon the conversation. It was
not till evening that the parties met again on the upper deck.
“I have been talking with Peek,” said Berwick, “and to
my dismay I find he was betrayed by the husband of my
step-mother. You must help me cancel this infernal wrong.”
“I have laid my plans for taking all these negroes ashore at
midnight at our next stopping-place,” replied Vance. “I am
to personate their owner. The keepers of the boat, who have
seen me so much with Hyde, will offer no opposition. He is
already so drunk that we have had to put him to bed. He
begged me to look after his niggers. Whiskey had made him
sentimental. He wept maudlin tears, and wanted to kiss me.”
“Here 's a check,” said Berwick, “for twenty-five hundred
dollars. Give it to Peek the moment he is free.”
Vance placed it in a small water-proof wallet.
What 's the matter?
A rush and a commotion on the deck! Captain Crane left
the wheel-house, and jumped over the railing down to the lower
deck forward, his mouth bubbling and foaming with oaths.
There had been a slackening of the fires, and the Champion
was all at once found to be fast gaining on the Pontiac.
“Fire up!” yelled the Captain. “Pile on the turpentine
splinters. Bring up the rosin. Blast yer all for a set of cowardly
cusses! I 'm bound to land yer either in Helena or hell,
ahead of the Champion.”
