The poetical works of James Montgomery :: :: University of Virginia Library

The Love of Country, and of Home, the same in all Ages and among all Nations.—The Negro's Home and Country.—Mungo Park.—Progress of the Slave Trade.—The Middle Passage.—The Negro in the West Indies.—The Guinea Captain. —The Creole Planter.—The Moors of Barbary. —Buccaneers.—Maroons.—St. Domingo.— Hurricanes.—The Yellow Fever.

There is a land, of every land the pride,
Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside;
Where brighter suns dispense serener light,
And milder moons emparadise the night;
A land of beauty, virtue, valour, truth,
Time-tutor'd age, and love-exalted youth;
The wandering mariner, whose eye explores
The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting shores,
Views not a realm so bountiful and fair,
Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air;
In every clime the magnet of his soul,
Touch'd by remembrance, trembles to that pole;
For in this land of Heaven's peculiar grace,
The heritage of nature's noblest race,
There is a spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest,
Where man, creation's tyrant, casts aside
His sword and sceptre, pageantry and pride,
While in his soften'd looks benignly blend
The sire, the son, the husband, brother, friend:
Here woman reigns; the mother, daughter, wife,
Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life;
In the clear heaven of her delightful eye,
An angel-guard of loves and graces lie;
Around her knees domestic duties meet,
And fire-side pleasures gambol at her feet.
“Where shall that land, that spot of earth, be found?”
Art thou a man?—a patriot?—look around;
O, thou shalt find, howe'er thy footsteps roam,
That land thy country, and that spot thy home!

On Greenland's rocks, o'er rude Kamschatka's plains,
In pale Siberia's desolate domains;
When the wild hunter takes his lonely way,
Tracks through tempestuous snows his savage prey,
The reindeer's spoil, the ermine's treasure, shares,
And feasts his famine on the fat of bears;
Or, wrestling with the might of raging seas,
Where round the pole the eternal billows freeze,
Plucks from their jaws the stricken whale, in vain
Plunging down headlong through the whirling main;
—His wastes of ice are lovelier in his eye
Than all the flowery vales beneath the sky;
And dearer far than Cæsar's palace-dome,
His cavern-shelter, and his cottage-home.

O'er China's garden-fields and peopled floods;
In California's pathless world of woods;
Round Andes' heights, where Winter, from his throne,
Looks down in scorn upon the Summer zone;
By the gay borders of Bermuda's isles,
Where Spring with everlasting verdure smiles;
On pure Madeira's vine-robed hills of health;
In Java's swamps of pestilence and wealth;
Where Babel stood, where wolves and jackals drink,
Midst weeping willows, on Euphrates' brink;

On Carmel's crest; by Jordan's reverend stream,
Where Canaan's glories vanish'd like a dream;
Where Greece, a spectre, haunts her heroes' graves,
And Rome's vast ruins darken Tiber's waves;
Where broken-hearted Switzerland bewails
Her subject mountains and dishonour'd vales;
Where Albion's rocks exult amidst the sea,
Around the beauteous isle of Liberty;
—Man, through all ages of revolving time,
Unchanging man, in every varying clime,
Deems his own land of every land the pride,
Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside;
His home the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.

And is the Negro outlaw'd from his birth?
Is he alone a stranger on the earth?
Is there no shed, whose peeping roof appears
So lovely that it fills his eyes with tears?
No land, whose name, in exile heard, will dart
Ice through his veins, and lightning through his heart?
Ah! yes; beneath the beams of brighter skies,
His home amidst his father's country lies;
There with the partner of his soul he shares
Love-mingled pleasures, love-divided cares:
There, as with nature's warmest filial fire,
He soothes his blind, and feeds his helpless, sire;
His children sporting round his hut behold
How they shall cherish him when he is old,
Train'd by example from their tenderest youth
To deeds of charity, and words of truth.
—Is he not blest? Behold, at closing day,
The negro-village swarms abroad to play;
He treads the dance through all its rapturous rounds,
To the wild music of barbarian sounds;
Or, stretch'd at ease, where broad palmettos shower
Delicious coolness in his shadowy bower,
He feasts on tales of witchcraft, that give birth
To breathless wonder, or ecstatic mirth:
Yet most delighted, when, in rudest rhymes,
The minstrel wakes the song of elder times,
When men were heroes, slaves to Beauty's charms,
And all the joys of life were love and arms.
—Is not the Negro blest? His generous soil
With harvest-plenty crowns his simple toil;
More than his wants his flocks and fields afford:
He loves to greet the stranger at his board:
“The winds were roaring, and the White Man fled,
The rains of night descended on his head;
The poor White Man sat down beneath our tree,
Weary and faint, and far from home, was he:
For him no mother fills with milk the bowl,
No wife prepares the bread to cheer his soul;
—Pity the poor White Man who sought our tree,
No wife, no mother, and no home, has he.”
Thus sang the Negro's daughters;—once again,
O that the poor White Man might hear that strain!
—Whether the victim of the treacherous Moor,
Or from the Negro's hospitable door
Spurn'd as a spy from Europe's hateful clime,
And left to perish for thy country's crime;
Or destined still, when all thy wanderings cease,
On Albion's lovely lap to rest in peace;
Pilgrim! in heaven or earth, where'er thou be,
Angels of mercy guide and comfort thee!

Thus lived the Negro in his native land,
Till Christian cruisers anchor'd on his strand:
Where'er their grasping arms the spoilers spread,
The Negro's joys, the Negro's virtues, fled;
Till, far amidst the wilderness unknown,
They flourish'd in the sight of Heaven alone:
While from the coast, with wide and wider sweep,
The race of Mammon dragg'd across the deep
Their sable victims, to that western bourn,
From which no traveller might e'er return,
To blazon in the ears of future slaves
The secrets of the world beyond the waves.

When the loud trumpet of eternal doom
Shall break the mortal bondage of the tomb;
When with a mother's pangs the expiring earth
Shall bring her children forth to second birth;

Then shall the sea's mysterious caverns, spread
With human relics, render up their dead:
Though warm with life the heaving surges glow,
Where'er the winds of heaven were wont to blow,
In sevenfold phalanx shall the rallying hosts
Of ocean slumberers join their wandering ghosts,
Along the melancholy gulph, that roars
From Guinea to the Charibbean shores,
Myriads of slaves, that perish'd on the way,
From age to age the shark's appointed prey,
By livid plagues, by lingering tortures slain,
Or headlong plunged alive into the main,
Shall rise in judgment from their gloomy beds,
And call down vengeance on their murderers' heads.

Yet small the number, and the fortune blest,
Of those who in the stormy deep found rest,
Weigh'd with the unremember'd millions more,
That 'scaped the sea, to perish on the shore,
By the slow pangs of solitary care,
The earth-devouring anguish of despair,
The broken heart, which kindness never heals,
The home-sick passion which the Negro feels,
When, toiling, fainting in the land of canes,
His spirit wanders to his native plains;
His little lovely dwelling there he sees,
Beneath the shade of his paternal trees,
The home of comfort:—then before his eyes
The terrors of captivity arise.
—'Twas night:—his babes around him lay at rest,
Their mother slumber'd on their father's breast:
A yell of murder rang around their bed;
They woke; their cottage blazed; the victims fled;
Forth sprang the ambush'd ruffians on their prey,
They caught, they bound, they drove them far away;
The white man bought them at the mart of blood;
In pestilential barks they cross'd the flood;
Then were the wretched ones asunder torn,
To distant isles, to separate bondage borne,
Denied, though sought with tears, the sad relief
That misery loves,—the fellowship of grief.
The Negro, spoil'd of all that nature gave
To freeborn man, thus shrunk into a slave;
His passive limbs, to measured tasks confined,
Obey'd the impulse of another mind;
A silent, secret, terrible control,
That ruled his sinews, and repress'd his soul.
Not for himself he waked at morning-light,
Toil'd the long day, and sought repose at night;
His rest, his labour, pastime, strength, and health,
Were only portions of a master's wealth;
His love—O, name not love, where Britons doom
The fruit of love to slavery from the womb!

Thus spurn'd, degraded, trampled, and oppress'd,
The Negro-exile languish'd in the West,
With nothing left of life but hated breath,
And not a hope except the hope in death—
To fly for ever from the Creole-strand,
And dwell a freeman in his father-land.

Lives there a savage ruder than the slave?
—Cruel as death, insatiate as the grave,
False as the winds that round his vessel blow,
Remorseless as the gulf that yawns below,
Is he who toils upon the wafting flood,
A Christian broker in the trade of blood!
Boisterous in speech, in action prompt and bold,
He buys, he sells,—he steals, he kills, for gold.
At noon, when sky and ocean, calm and clear,
Bend round his bark one blue unbroken sphere;
When dancing dolphins sparkle through the brine,
And sunbeam circles o'er the waters shine;
He sees no beauty in the heaven serene,
No soul-enchanting sweetness in the scene,
But, darkly scowling at the glorious day,
Curses the winds that loiter on their way.
When, swoln with hurricanes, the billows rise
To meet the lightning midway from the skies;
When, from the unburden'd hold, his shrieking slaves
Are cast, at midnight, to the hungry waves;
Not for his victims strangled in the deeps,
Not for his crimes, the harden'd pirate weeps,—
But, grimly smiling, when the storm is o'er,
Counts his sure gains, and hurries back for more.

Lives there a reptile baser than the slave?
—Loathsome as death, corrupted as the grave,
See the dull Creole, at his pompous board,
Attendant vassals cringing round their lord:
Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close,
Voluptuous minions fan him to repose;
Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain,
Delirious slumbers rock his maudlin brain;
He starts in horror from bewildering dreams;
His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams:
He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds,
The Negro trembles, and the lash resounds,
And cries of anguish, shrilling through the air,
To distant fields his dread approach declare.
Mark, as he passes, every head declined;
Then slowly raised,—to curse him from behind.
This is the veriest wretch on nature's face,
Own'd by no country, spurn'd by every race;
The tether'd tyrant of one narrow span,
The bloated vampire of a living man;
His frame,—a fungous form, of dunghill birth,
That taints the air, and rots above the earth;
His soul—has he a soul, whose sensual breast
Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest;
Who follows, headlong, ignorant, and blind,
The vague brute instinct of an idiot mind;
Whose heart, 'midst scenes of suffering senseless grown,
E'en from his mother's lap was chill'd to stone;
Whose torpid pulse no social feelings move?
A stranger to the tenderness of love,
His motley harem charms his gloating eye,
Where ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie;
His children, sprung alike from sloth and vice,
Are born his slaves, and loved at market price:
Has he a soul?—With his departing breath,
A form shall hail him at the gates of death,—
The spectre Conscience,—shrieking through the gloom,
“Man! we shall meet again beyond the tomb.”

O Africa! amidst thy children's woes,
Did earth and heaven conspire to aid thy foes?
No, thou hadst vengeance—from thy northern shores
Sallied the lawless corsairs of the Moors,
And back on Europe's guilty nations hurl'd
Thy wrongs and sufferings in the sister world:
Deep in thy dungeons Christians clank'd their chains,
Or toil'd and perish'd on thy parching plains.

But where thine offspring crouch'd beneath the yoke,
In heavier peals the avenging thunder broke.

—Leagued with rapacious rovers of the main,
Hayti's barbarian hunters harass'd Spain,
A mammoth race, invincible in might,
Rapine and massacre their dire delight,
Peril their element;—o'er land and flood
They carried fire, and quench'd the flames with blood;
Despairing captives hail'd them from the coasts;
They rush'd to conquest, led by Charib ghosts.

Tremble, Britannia! while thine islands tell
The appalling mysteries of Obi's spell;
The wild Maroons, impregnable and free,
Among the mountain-holds of liberty,
Sudden as lightning darted on their foe,—
Seen like the flash, remember'd like the blow.

While Gallia boasts of dread Marengo's fight,
And Hohenlinden's slaughter-deluged night,
Her spirit sinks;—the sinews of the brave,
That crippled Europe, shrunk before the slave;
The demon-spectres of Domingo rise,
And all her triumphs vanish from her eyes.

God is a Spirit, veil'd from human sight
In secret darkness of eternal light:
Through all the glory of his works we trace
The hidings of his counsel and his face;
Nature, and time, and change, and fate fulfil,
Unknown, unknowing, his mysterious will;
Mercies and judgments mark him, every hour,
Supreme in grace, and infinite in power:
Oft o'er the Eden-islands of the West,
In floral pomp and verdant beauty drest,
Roll the dark clouds of his awaken'd ire:
—Thunder and earthquake, whirlwind, flood, and fire,
Midst reeling mountains and disparting plains,
Tell the pale world,—“the God of vengeance reigns.”

Nor in the majesty of storms alone,
The Eternal makes his dread displeasure known.
At his command, the pestilence abhorr'd
Spares the poor slave, and smites the haughty lord:
While to the tomb he sees his friend consign'd,
Foreboding melancholy sinks his mind;
Soon at his heart he feels the monster's fangs,
They tear his vitals with convulsive pangs:
The light is anguish to his eye; the air,
Sepulchral vapours laden with despair:
Now frenzy-horrors rack his whirling brain,
Tremendous pulses throb through every vein;
The firm earth shrinks beneath his torture-bed,
The sky in ruins rushes o'er his head;—
He rolls, he rages, in consuming fires,
Till nature, spent with agony, expires!