Deportment

“ True, by such deportment they unquestionably harm themselves; but consider of how little value life is from their stand-point. They grope in the darkness of this transition period, and rarely find any sure stay for the weary arm and the fainting heart. ”

“ Although no personal graces—no urbanity—no kindness, can be substituted for unremitting study, and discriminating observation, yet it is practicable to adopt a deportment equally remote from pliancy and barbarity. ”

“ ON DEPORTMENT.
Much of the pleasure of social communication depends on the laws of deportment. Deportment may be divided into that, which, by marking refinement and polish, is termed breeding; and that, which, though less distinguished for finesse and finish, denoting a sense of civility and respect, is usually termed manners. The first can only be expected in men and women of the world, or those who are properly styled gentlemen and ladies; while an absence of the last is a proof of vulgarity and coarseness, that every citizen of a free state should be desirous of avoiding. ”

“ The crooked stratagems, the arts, toils, concealments and self-denials, which are necessary to carry on a successful imposition, are far more onerous and painful than all the duties which a life of probity enjoins; while the consciousness of an [174] upright deportment diffuses through the whole man that security and serenity which infinitely outweighs all the advantages of successful cunning. ”

“ He is celebrated, almost everywhere, for his Deportment." ”

“ A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it. ”

“ Its usual deportment is grave and imposing, exhibiting little of the vivacity or inquisitiveness of many of its tribe; it is roused to exertion chiefly by a sense of danger, or the cravings of hunger. ”

“ A little knowledge of human nature, and attention to its ordinary workings, might have foreseen that the spirits of the people here were in a state, in which they were more likely to be provoked, than frightened, by haughty deportment. ”

“ Think, think of the aged poor torn from their kindred, caged in a prison, refused all aid within, debarred from every hope without,—think of the flesh, the very flesh, rotting by slow degrees, and then in putrid masses falling from their wretched bones: think, we say, on this—then give what name you can, save murder, to their quickly succeeding death. ”

“ Thou venturest again to aim against my life—against me, by whom thou wert raised from the condition of the beasts of the field, and from the certainty of everlasting perdition?—Away—away with thee to prison! ”

“ Three poor beings, almost newborn, unconscious, deserted, orphaned, alone, lisping, smiling, were seen face to face with civil war, retaliation, the frightful logic of reprisals, murder, carnage, fratricide, rage, malice, all the Gorgons, and yet triumphant. ”

“ The hour is at hand for a great sacrifice—the time is ripe for redemption. The public you would propitiate fears death—loathes blood. For these alone will it stop and think—all else touches only what money can cure. But death arrests—blood you cannot buy. Make them take what they cannot return—make them shed blood they cannot wash out. No, not with their tears!”
He paused again and gazed into the faces half hid by the smoky atmosphere. Mystic, dreamer, lunatic—what you will,—he held the men in weird fascination. ”

“ The string then started to run, dragging, rolling in the dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged to be killed; but perchance he succeeded in getting on his feet and then went along crying like a child and cursing the hour he was born.
The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then the prisoners continued on their way with parched mouths, darkened brains, and hearts full of curses. ”

“ They must learn to suffer hunger, laugh at labor and privation,
They must stand and take their chances, whether death or mutiliation,
Of the prison worse that either with its torture and starvation. ”

“ Like the criminal under sentence of death, he notches upon his wooden stick, as Sterne's captive did, the days, after the lapse of which he must be introduced to his dreaded fate; in the case of the criminal, merely death — a cessation from the pains and toils of life; but in our cases, the commencement of a living death; a death never ending, second in horror only to the eternal torment of the wicked in a future state. ”

“ Whene'er that ruffian's tossing limb,
Crimson with murder, touches him!
What has the gray-haired prisoner done?
⁠Has murder stained his hands with gore?
Not so: his crime's a fouler one:
⁠God made the old man poor! ”

“ Prison, prison, bonds and limitations everywhere! The human being stares hopelessly through the barred window of his personality at the high walls of outward circumstance, till Death comes and calls him home to freedom! ”

“ In siege and battle—in the deadly air of pestilential cities—in the long exhaustion of mind and body which comes from unduly protracted labor and anxiety—amid the countless conspiracies of assassins—he was daily exposed to death in every shape. ”

“ Hunger, like a grim tyrant, has driven her to seek shelter in this wretched abode. Despair has made her but too anxious that the grave or prison walls should close the record of her sorrows. How tightly she with her right hand presses her babe to her bosom; how appealingly with her left she asks a pittance of the detective! ”

“ Men of various types and all ages obeyed the summons—the white-haired convict, reckless and hopeless, the larger half of whose life had been spent within prison walls, and who was now doomed to linger out the last years of a ruined life in places of confinement. The whole expression of the face denoted the human wreck which the forçat had become. ”

“ As might be suspected, seasoned as it was with such a population, drunkenness, debauchery, and murder walked abroad, hand in hand, day and night. Human life was valued no higher than the life of an ox or a hog, and the heart of the settlement was cold, and palsied to the most remote touch of feeling, and hardened to the recital of brutalities and crimes of the most indescribable enormity. Men talked of their evil doings, their deep, revolting guilt, with the most impudent freedom, and laughed and chuckled over them as though they were the best jokes in the world! ”

“ An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when, thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it. ”

“ Imprisonment is afflictive, and ignominious death is fearful! But let us compare our condition with that which our actions might reasonably have incurred. The robber might died in the act of violence, by lawful resistance. ”

“ ON TRANSPORTATION. The frequency of capital punishment in this country has long excited a general feeling of abhorrence, not merely from the removal of a malefactor from the stage of life, but the distress produced in the display of a scene relieving the unfortunate sufferer from worldly troubles, yet leaving a too painful impression on the mind of the spectator. There is a hallowed reverence thrown around the grave of even the hardiest offender whose crimes have been expiated by his death. ”

“ The weight of sacrifice alone can in its turn crush down the weight which crushes us. In the world’s story, sacrifice is lionlike and unconquered still; but crime is as the chaff which the wind in passing sweeps away. ”

“ Some cursed the day they were born; some, the day of their captivity; some attributed all their sufferings to the inattention of the Agent, and others, to the government of the United States. We retired to our hammocks, and gave vent to our feelings in sighs and tears.
The thought that we must forego all the endearments of life, and perish together, in a foreign country, among our enemies, was too much for our feelings to bear. The groans of the disconsolate and sick filled the whole prison. Our Agent not empowered to act, and without funds! ”

“ At length, after three-quarters of an hour of this monstrous effort, of this spectacle without a name, of this agony—agony for all, be it understood—agony for the assembled spectators as well as for the condemned man—after this age of anguish, gentlemen of the jury, they take back the poor wretch to his prison. The people breathe again. The people, naturally merciful, hope that the man will be spared. ”

“ Thou ingrate race, is this the reward due to men who have labored many years thy faithful servant, and now, after having dragged out a painful imprisonment for two years, and the moment the hope of returning had rekindled the sparks of life, must be massacred in a most barbarous manner, and denied the right of the grave? ”

“ In this collection of men from all parts of the world, every phase of human character was represented; the stronger preyed upon 50the weaker, and even the sick who were unable to defend themselves were robbed of their scanty supplies of food and clothing. Dark stories were afloat, of men, both sick and well, who were murdered at night, strangled to death by comrades for scant supplies of clothing or money. ”

“ If one drooped In the lovely Court—her dark glance dim, her feet Faint in the dance—the guiltless criminal Passed forth an exile from that Paradise, Lest he should see and suffer at her woe. Bright-eyed intendants watched to execute Sentence on such as spake of the harsh world Without, where aches and plagues were, tears and fears, And wail of mourners, and grim fume of pyres. ”

“ But while we witness the guilty revelling in wealth and affluence, how often are the innocent plunged in want? Aye, myriads of times. We know not of them, but over the land there are hundreds of our fellow mortals whose days are but a repetition of suffering. Famine and sickness have stalked in the midst of hundreds who are innocent of crime, and reduced them to the last brink of despair. ”

“ Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it. When there was reason and desire to punish we wrote our lesson with gun or whip immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of courts and gaols. ”

“ There falleth so continually before the eyes of our heart a fearful imagination of this terrible thing: his mighty strength and power, his high malice and hatred, and his incomparable cruelty, with robbing, spoiling, burning, and laying waste all the way that his army cometh; then, killing or carrying away the people thence, far from home, and there severing the couples and the kindred asunder, every one far from the other, some kept in thraldom and some kept in prison and some for a triumph tormented and killed in his presence ”

“ Then he begged, "Don't take my life—a prisoner,' but I put the gun to him, and he said, 'You may kill me, but it will be revenged; there are 80,000 persons sworn to carry on this work.' That was his last expression. We bore him out on the bridge with the purpose then of hanging him; we had no rope, and none could be found; it was a moment of wild excitement. ”

“ As it was, bound and grasped in the arms of strong men, entirely helpless and equally without hope, his death staring him in the face, he gave himself up at once to unmanly fears, and wept, screamed, and prayed, until the guards, at watch in the vestibule, sank upon their knees and conned over their beads, to divert their senses from cries so agonized and so horrible. ”

“ If we want to understand how completely all their natural feelings were lost in this absorbing fear, we must turn to the picture given by an observer who was outside their world; an observer who could enter into the misery of the punished, and could describe what transportation meant to boys of nine and ten, exposed to the most brutal appetites of savage men; to chained convicts, packed for the night in boxes so narrow that they could only lie on one side; to crushed and broken men, whose only prayer it was to die. ”

“ He does not fear the calumnies of the base, nor the frowns of the great. 'Tis death which delivers the prisoner from his fetters, and the slave and captive from his chain; 'tis death which rescues the servant from the endless toils of a laborious life, the poor from oppression, and makes the beggar equal with princes. ”

“ Whosoever sheds man's blood, his blood shall be shed," and in the following books we find the evolutions of this law and civil society keeping equal pace in recounting and specifying the numerous crimes worthy of death. ”

“ The consequence of all this was that the prisoners died like sheep. Whatever the immediate cause of their death, that cause was induced by starvation, and over the dead bodies of nine-tenths of those brave, true men there can be given but one true verdict: "Death by starvation" I remember one instance that, suffering as I was myself, touched me to the heart. ”

“ Despair, therefore, no doubt induced many to perpetrate acts of which they were accused, and to rob, swindle, and murder, because they were punished as thieves and assassins. But, some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly, hospitable, and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves ungrateful, as well as infamous. ”

“ The fugitive who once enters the fatal bounds, never dares leave them. Three years is the extent to which a man can drag out existence in this pestilential atmosphere. So here the hardened criminal comes to die, in his desire to escape from death. ”

“ Sooner than have been ingloriously dismissed; sooner than to have been branded with the name of deserter—a stain never to be washed out, a stigma to mark your remembrance and disgrace your children after you are dead—sooner than this should have ever overtaken you, you have showed by your gallant conduct that you would have preferred to have been riddled by the enemy’s bullets and died on the field. ”

“ Men and women, gaunt, grim, and ghastly, wandered about in hopeless demoralisation; and starving children with eyes starting from their heads and bones protroding through their skins, made piteous wailing as they moan for food ”