Epes Sargent

“ What a triumph now to think that she was no longer his slave!
But Clara,—what of her? Mrs. Ratcliff’s sudden death seemed to shatter the last barrier between her and danger.
Ratcliff did not affect to conceal his satisfaction. Here was a double victory! The Federals and his wife both disposed of in one day! Youth and beauty within his grasp! Truly, fortune seemed to be heaping her good things upon him. That half a million too, in Winslow’s hands, would come very opportunely; for slaves could be bought cheap, dog-cheap, now that croakers were predicting ruin to the institution. ”

“ Regarding poor little Clara Berwick (or Ellen Murray) as a slave, she could never be so far moved by the child’s winning presence and ways as to look on her as entitled to the same atmosphere and sun as herself. No infantile grace, no solicitation of affection, could ever melt the icy barrier with which the pride and self-seeking, fostered by slavery, had encircled the heart, not naturally bad, of the schoolmistress. ”

“ Though I had had two children, one by him and one by his son, the old man’s widow sent me to the auction-block. I was sold to the highest bidder. I was bought by Mr. Carberry Ratcliff.”
“Ah! by him? by him?” muttered Esha.
“I was handsome. He made me his favorite. I’ve been faithful to him. Even his wife, poor thing, blesses the day I came into the house. She would have died long ago but for my care. The slaves, too, come to me with their sorrows. I do what I can for their relief. I am not, by nature, a bad woman. I would continue to serve this man and his household.” ”

“ Learn now that you belong to Mr. Carberry Ratcliff, whom you met here some weeks ago. He is the rich planter whose house and grounds in Lafayette you’ve often admired.”
“Belong to him?” cried Clara. “What do you mean? Am I his daughter? Am I in any way related?”
“No, you’re his slave. He bought you at auction.”
Impulsive as her own mocking-bird by nature, Clara had learned that cruel lesson, which gifted children are often compelled to acquire when subjected to the rule of inferior minds,—the art, namely, of checking and disguising the emotions. ”

“ The devil of slavery must go out of us, and as it is the worst of all the devils that ever afflicted mankind, it can go out only through unprecedented convulsions and tearings and agonies. The North must suffer as well as the South, for the North shares in the guilt of slavery, and there are thousands of men there who shut their eyes to its enormities. Believe me, their are high spiritual laws underlying national offences; and the Nemesis that must punish ours is near at hand. Slavery must be destroyed, and war is the only instrumentality that I can conceive of energetic enough to do it. ”

“ 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, 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. ”

“ Write by the next mail to William C. Vance, Washington, D. C. Tell him what has happened. Tell him how your mother died. He’ll be your friend. You fought bravely, my son. What sweetness God puts into this moment! Take no trouble about the body I leave behind. Any trench will do for it. Fight on for freedom and the right. Slavery must die. All wrong must die. You can’t wrong even a worm without wronging yourself more than it. Remember that. Holy living makes holy believing. Charity first. Think to shut out others from heaven, and the danger is great you’ll shut yourself out. ”

“ One man sees an apple fall, and straightway thinks of the price of cider. Newton sees it, and it suggests gravitation. One man sees a table rise in the air, and cries: ‘It can’t be a spirit; ’t is too undignified for a spirit!’ Mountford sees it, and the immortality of the soul is thenceforth to him a fact as positive as any fact of science.”
“Your story, dear Mr. Kenrick, your story!” urged Laura.
“My story is ended. The ghost has come and vanished.”
“Is that all?” whined Laura. “Are n’t we, then, to have a story?”
“In mercy give us some music, Miss Brown,” said Onslow. ”

“ Truth beamed from her looks, and made itself musical in her tones, and Clara gratefully pressed her hand.
“And shall I have Esha with me?” she asked.
“Yes; and Mrs. Ratcliff, though an invalid, will also befriend you. ’T will be strange indeed if we four women can’t defeat one man.”
“But I shall have all the slave-hunters in the Confederacy after me if I try to get away.”
“Do not fear. We have golden keys that open many doors of escape.”
Clara did not hesitate. She had faith in Esha’s quickness, as well as in her own, to detect insincerity. ”

“ It may seem almost incredible to you who are from the North, that any man not insane should be guilty of such atrocities. But Mr. Onslow need not be told that slavery educates men—men, too, of a certain refinement—to deeds even more cowardly and fiendish. Do not imagine that the tyrant who would not scruple to put a black skin under the lash, would hesitate in regard to a white; and the note-book of many an overseer will show that of the whippings inflicted under slavery, more than one third are of women. [20]
For three weeks I was under Peek’s care. ”

“ There is no incompatibility between North and South, except what slavery engenders and strives to intensify. Strike away slavery, and the people gravitate to each other by laws higher than the bad passions of your Rhetts, Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble writers of the South, who are eternally raving about the mean, low-born Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation and prejudice, are merely the tools of a few plotting oligarchs who hope to be the chiefs of a Southern Confederacy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Surely the negro showed himself better worthy of freedom than any white man among his hunters.
Would the fellow keep his pledge? Would he come back? Blake now earnestly hoped he would not. Was not any stratagem justifiable in such a case? Should we mind resorting to deception in order to rescue ourselves or another from a madman or a murderer? Why, then, might not Peek violate his written promise, made as it was to men who were trying to rob him of a freedom more precious than life to such a soul as his? ”

“ It strikes me that a fellow like Peek—with his senses always in good working trim, who never misses his aim, who can hit a mark by moonlight at forty paces, and shoot a bird on the wing in bright noonday, who can detect a tread or a flutter of wings when to your ear all is silence—is as competent to see straight and judge of sights and sounds as any blinkard from a college, even though he wear spectacles and call himself professor of mathematics. Remember, Peek is not a superstitious nigger. He will feel personally obliged to any ghost who will show himself. ”

“ He drew near to Clara and took her hand, which she quickly withdrew. “Only maiden coyness,” thought he, and said: “We must be better acquainted. But I must now hasten from your dangerous society, or I shall miss the steamer. Good by, my dear. Good by, Mrs. Gentry. You shall hear from me very soon.”
And Mrs. Gentry rang the bell, and black Tarquin opened the door for Ratcliff. As it closed upon him, “Who is that old man?” asked Clara.
“Old? Why, he does doesn’t look a year over forty,” replied Mrs. Gentry. “That’s the rich Mr. Ratcliff.” ”

“ Retribution must come,—come with bloodshed, anguish, and desolation to both North and South,—to Slavery, with spasms of diabolical cruelty, violence, and unholy wrath, and to Freedom with trials long and doubtful, but awaking the persistent energy which a righteous cause will inspire, and leading ultimately to permanent triumph and to the annihilation on this continent of the foul power which has ruled us so long, and which shall dare to close in deadly combat with the young genius of universal Liberty. ”

“ Esha, the colored cook, a slave, was Clara’s fast friend in all her youthful troubles. Esha had passed through all degrees of slavery,—from toiling in a cotton-field to serving as a lady’s maid. Having had a child, a little girl, taken from her and sold, she ever afterwards refused to be again a mother. The straight hair, coppery hue, and somewhat Caucasian cast of features of this slave showed that she belonged to a race different from that of the ordinary negro. ”

“ And I am lying here wounded, soon to be dragged forth and hung—for what?—for unbelief, not in a God, but in the Southern Confederacy and its corner-stone!
“And this is slavery! All these brutalities and wrongs spring from slavery as naturally as the fruit from the blossom. That which is inherently wrong must, by eternal laws, still produce and reproduce wrong. The right to hold one innocent 322man a slave, implies the right to enslave or murder any other man! There is no such right. It is a lie born in the inmost brain of hell. No laws can make it a right. ”

“ She was on the point of uttering that one name, Ratcliff,—a sound that would have inspired Vance with the power and wisdom of an archangel to rescue her,—when there were voices at the door, and Laura entered, followed by Onslow. They brought with them a noise of talking and laughing. Soon Kenrick joined the party.
The golden opportunity seemed to have slipped by!
To Kenrick’s gaze Clara never appeared so transcendent. But there was an unwonted paleness on her cheeks; and what meant that thoughtful and serious air? For a sensitive moral barometer commend us to a lover’s heart! ”

“ Poor old Esha was Mahometan through reverence for her father; Catholic through influences from the family with whom she lived when a child; and Protestant through knowledgeknowledge of many good men and women of that faith. She cared not how many saints there were in her calendar. The more the merrier. All goodness in man or woman, of whatever race or sect, was deified in her simple and semi-barbarous conceptions. Poor, ignorant, sinful, unregenerate creature!
“God bless you, Esha!” said Clara. “Look! There is poor Dainty perched on the window-sill. Plainly he is no Abolitionist. ”

“ True, Josephine rigidly exacted conformity to the conditions that kept him aloof from all communication with the girl. But Ratcliff, through the window-blinds, would now and then see her, in the pride of youth and beauty, walking with Esha in the garden. He would hear her songs, too. And once,—when he thought no one knew it,—though the quadroon had her eye on him,—he overheard Clara’s conversation. “She has mind as well as beauty,” thought he. ”

“ To play the blackleg and the sharper in a matter of the affections is not penal. Success consecrates the crime; and the victim, when her eyes are at length opened to the extent of the deception and the misery, must continue to submit to a yoke at once hateful and demoralizing; she must submit, unless she is willing to brave the ban of society and the persecutions of the law.
Ralph Charlton, when he gave his wife Berwick’s letter the night before, had supposed she would sit down to pen an answer as soon as she was alone. ”