Jean-Charles Houzeau

“ To his Christian charity, to the gentle virtues of Minister of the Gospel, this missionary combines a fiery soul. He belongs to the brave army of Methodist preachers, who constantly travel the country. Tireless in their efforts, roaming up hill and down dale; camping for months in the virgin prairie, braving the scorching sun of summer and the north winds of winter, living on little, paid only voluntary subscriptions, often belated — these elite priests go everywhere to help up the weak, relieve suffering, and to rescue the oppressed. ”

“ It was a long, slow convoy of ox-carts, cluttered with furniture, cooking pots, farm implements, and — as an introduction — women and children. Here and there appeared a light carriage, laden with any more delicate chests, containing, to all appearance, valuables, and guarded with the same zeal than the tabernacle of the Hebrews.
The men are armed to the teeth. Women cry at the top of their carts. Everyone goes headlong, and all are probably never to return. ”

“ Does it not happen to us in Europe to pass by a house where the head of the family castigates his wife or children? "That's the butcher punishing his slave", said nonchalantly a big boy of eighteen or twenty years of age, after having listened for a moment, while returning to his home. ”

“ It was a sort of rage to make money from one's fellow men, women, and children. A society whose ruling class is exclusively dominated by this passion has no solid elements for lasting. This ephemeral triumph of lust for gold is no less than a stain in history and a disgrace for humanity.
No doubt that there are, among the the planters, exceptions. The old established families, and in which the slaves were passed from father to son, have kept almost all the old patriarchal system. They saw with dread the attempt to bring down the blacks and enslave poor whites ”

“ The day of my visit to Von Lenz, a butcher in the area, B... of Smithville, arrived early in the morning in a light carriage, drawn by two spirited horses; without even taking the time to unhitch, he had requested on the spot an interview. He was one of those ordinary men, to whom nerve holds as merit, and whose thinking stops where benefit comes to an end. He offered to rent one of the young slaves. The women had just returned from the cottonfield; Amanda was presiding over their lunch. The butcher scanned, with an expert eye, all those in the hall; his gaze halted on the young white one. ”

“ It was therefore not without astonishment, nor without some kind of pleasure that I came across, at the head of water of the Blanco river, an isolated farm, the remotest oasis of the county.
I found, at the settler's, milk, fruits, and the first comfort which no home ever lacks. I made use of his kind hospitality. He had been established in those mountains for five years, surrounded only by his family, growing some corn, and busy in the care of his flock. ”

“ On the other hand, the government, knowing of our isolation from the world and our being deprived of any means of decrying it, shouts out that all the civilized nations of the earth have become indifferent to the plight of slaves. They tell us that the Wilberforces and Broughams are dead, that Europe has proclaimed the worship of Mammon, that material interests have erased all but the last traces of the civilizing idea. ”

“ It is enough, my friends, he continued, turning to the small group assembled, it is sufficient that the identity of the traveler not be proven. He is a dangerous man, a Unionist, that's obvious. But that he participated in the escape of runaways, and whether he is the Methodist preacher who has been seen yesterday in Smithville, we are not sure. Are you quite decided, he continued, turning to the merchant, are you decided, if we let you go, to leave Texas on the spot and by the shortest route, with no roundabout way, without speaking to either a black nor to a white person? ”

“ But for an old plantation, for a large farm of one or two hundred slaves, there are fifty small farms of ten or twenty. There you will find the nouveau riche masters in control, drunk on wealth and power that they find in the possession of man by man. ”

“ What isn't given me for once to speak with authority and make my voice sound throughout Europe? The southern United States is witnessing a heinous criminal attempt, which in the means of implementation, rivals the most bloody scenes and the most abhorred of the Inquisition. ”

“ In view of these alerts rangers, vigorous, passionate, — endowed with all the resources of war and industry: education, money, choice horses, accurate weapons — who would not have deplored the use which they were making of their strength and of their superiority? Social classes yield, just like individuals, to the influence of a monomania. Fair, enlightened, reasonable on everything else, they throw themselves in a strange bias when you tackle the dangerous subject. ”

“ To that bloody tyranny joins a terrible outburst of passions engendered by the ownership of man (and of woman) by man. There are no limits, there is no more restraint, there is no more modesty. Near Seguin (Texas) a master was hit by a slave for having, in the presence of the latter, put the negro's woman naked, etc.. The slave, it goes without saying, was hanged. In the main street of San Antonio, a young white woman, slave of one of the powerful men in the area, died of early motherhood. ”

“ The poor child sees nothing but ghosts, warriors, knives, poisoned arrows; she spurs her horse, she cries for her mother and her pitied mother cares for her. — This massive live oak cross, colorless, marks the recent burial of the shepherd. The ewes had returned in the evening without their master; people searched for a long time in the pristine countryside. ”

“ Jasper was of a different opinion. He held that every human being is to be free, and that it is a crime to disgrace a woman, irrespective of the arbitrary condition assigned to her by the law of the strongest. ”

“ I never tamper in the affairs of negroes. My business is legitimate and serious. I challenge you to find someone who saw me yesterday in Smithville. Chance alone led me down this road in a moment of defiance. I protest my innocence in the name of all that is sacred to you."
I realized at that moment, what is terrible in the situation of a stranger, taken, at the corner of a wood, by irritated country folk who are both judges and accusers. I heard the merchant, following the American expression, "pleading for his life". ”

“ You do know in what isolation the Southwestern U.S. states have immersed themselves since the beginning of the war. The postal service no longer crosses the border of the Confederate States. A strict blockade forbids us completely the way by sea. Our land routes, marked only by the passage of caravans and their carts, are of distressing length and difficulty. Texas alone offers a larger territory than France, but without pavement, canals, and almost without railways. ”

“ I have seen whip sick slaves, pregnant women. I saw, in a plantation of Guadalupe, a mulatto fall unconscious under the lash, and remain for long between life and death. The reason for this cruel treatment? He was driving on the road to Braunfels the carriage of the mistress of the house. A rider, sent by the planter, caught up with the carriage, and told the lady that her friends had arrived and that her husband was waiting. ”

“ No, there is in this so-called political movement in the South, there is a return to barbarism, that the manners of our time, the spirit of this century, our ideas of philanthropy, humanity, religion, cannot afford. ”

“ But what I've seen will suffice to give an idea of the society of the planters at the peak of their pretentions and their expectations.
In charge of some geological exploration, I left my home in southern Texas, in mid-April, and for ten weeks, traveled the pristine countryside in the last inhabited areas of the frontier, [3] heading up north to the coalfields of the upper Brazos river. This area has very few slaving farms. But down the Brazos and Colorado, corn and cotton plantations appear in abundance. ”

“ The rascal has never served us well. A thousand times my father ordered me to give him the leathers, which I made sure to season with pepper or salt. [9] Recently, he'd fallen into religion and had established himself a Methodist preacher. On Sundays, after I'd given moral instruction to the negroes of the plantation, he began to teach catechism to his comrades, and the black rascals liked his ignorant speeches better than the rhetoric that I've studied in college. ”

“ They believe in their hearts that there are duties of humanity, and fulfill them. Planters have already hanged some of these missionaries, but failed to deter them.
As soon as Rev. Jasper recognized me, he shook my hand, and without hesitation as without preamble: "Heaven sent you, he said. If ever escape is excusable and justified, it is that of Amanda. You just came in time, you will have her ride on the pillion." I then learned from the Methodist minister all the details of the plan, whose main author was risking his life. ”

“ Travel has become dangerous, because of the audacity of the Indians and the general disorganization. Secret committees, established by the plantation owners in all the counties are searching for suspects, and see abolitionist propaganda agents everywhere, to whom they reserve no better lot than that of, as they say, "pull the rope". ”

“ The reader, to appreciate the danger that threatened the peddler, must visualize the isolation of the scene. The hamlets are distant from one another by several leagues. The news of what took place in one often takes several days to reach the other. The few inhabitants take part together to a similar act of vengeance, and all have an interest in veiling its details. Judges are distant and indifferent; the police is non-existant. Civil servants also are devoted body and soul to serving the rich. ”

“ It includes men who are paler than you or I, it is a question of genealogy.
I saw a German who was a temporary slave in one of the western territories, where timed slavery is substituted for what we call in Europe civil imprisonment. Finally, we are coming to the outright servitude of the white, of the poor white. An odious attempt was made to restore slavery in Northern Mexico. The civil war was caused for this purpose and supported by subsidies, weapons, and gunpowder of the planters. ”

“ It is not, however, that the climate is unhealthy for white people, nor that free workers are in short supply in the countryside, since on the Brazos a large number of German settlers employ themselves at picking their richer neighbors' cotton, side by side with the slaves. ”

“ Others fell under the enraged rangers' ax, because they were "Unionists." I saw Bob Augustine killed by stabbing on the steps of Justice of the Peace of San Antonio. I saw another citizen, pursued at revolver shots on the streets of this small town, stain the pavement of his bloody track, and die at the corner of the marketplace. ”

“ And, when I say Negroes, it is to avoid the "people of color" circumlocution, because it is no longer easy to find a pure black. The colored population, especially those who are free, are mixed in the first, second, third and fourth degree. ”

“ This renting of slaves has become one of the gold mines of the planters, and one can easily imagine that the younger women and the most pale are most sought after. The scandals of the auction room and of its exhibitions are superseded by those of renting by the month, week, or for the night. ”

“ The question of the liberation of the slaves takes each day a more practical form. Irrespective of the emancipation by degrees which I speak of in the Revue, they must be given some land and all will be better. ”