Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman
guide to freedom friend or brother, or father and mother, if she had not
time to work for the money, she was persistent till she got it from
somebody. When she received one of her _intimations_ that the old people
were in trouble, and it was time for her to go to them, she asked the
Lord where she should go for the money. She was in some way, as she
supposed, directed to the office of a certain gentleman in New York.
When she left the house of her friends to go there, she said, "I'm gwine
to Mr. ----'s office, an' I ain't gwine to lebe there, an' I ain't gwine
to eat or drink till I git enough money to take me down after the ole
people."
She went into this gentleman's office.
"What do you want, Harriet?" was the first greeting.
"I want some money, sir."
"You do? How much do you want?"
"I want twenty dollars, sir."
"_Twenty dollars?_ Who told you to come here for twenty dollars?"
"De Lord tole me, sir."
"Well, I guess the Lord's mistaken this time."
"I guess he isn't, sir. Anyhow I'm gwine to sit here till I git it."
So she sat down and went to sleep. All the morning and all the afternoon
she sat there still, sleeping and rousing up--sometimes finding the
office full of gentlemen--sometimes finding herself alone. Many
fugitives were passing through New York at that time, and those who came
in supposed that she was one of them, tired out and resting. Sometimes
she would be roused up with the words, "Come, Harriet, you had better
go. There's no money for you here." "No, sir. I'm not gwine till I git
my twenty dollars."
She does not know all that happened, for deep sleep fell upon her; but
probably her story was whispered about, and she roused at last to find
herself the happy possessor of _sixty dollars_, which had been raised
among those who came into the office. She went on her way rejoicing, to
bring her old parents from the land of bondage. She found that her
father was to be tried the next Monday, for helping off slaves; so, as
she says, she "removed his trial to a higher court," and hurried him off
to Canada. One more little incident, which, it is hoped, may not be
offensive to the young lady to whom it alludes, may be mentioned here,
showing Harriet's extreme delicacy in asking anything for herself. Last
winter ('67 and '68), as we all know, the snow was very deep for months,
and Harriet and the old people were completely snowed-in in their little
home. The old man was laid up with rheumatism, and Harriet could not
leave home for a long time to procure supplies of corn, if she could
have made her way into the city. At length, stern necessity compelled
her to plunge through the drifts to the city, and she appeared at the
house of one of her firm and fast friends, and was directed to the room
of one of the young ladies. She began to walk up and down, as she always
does when in trouble. At length she said, "Miss Annie?" "What, Harriet?"
A long pause; then again, "Miss Annie?" "Well, what _is_ it, Harriet?"
This was repeated four times, when the young lady, looking up, saw her
eyes filled with tears. She then insisted on knowing what she wanted.
And with a great effort, she said, "Miss Annie, could you lend me a
quarter till Monday? I never asked it before." Kind friends immediately
supplied all the wants of the family, but on Monday Harriet appeared
with the quarter she had borrowed.
But though so timid for herself, she is bold enough when the wants of
her race are concerned. Even now, while friends are trying to raise the
means to publish this little book for her, _she_ is going around with
the greatest zeal and interest to raise a subscription for her
Freedmen's Fair. She called on Hon. Wm. H. Seward, the other day, for a
subscription to this object. He said, "Harriet, you have worked for
others long enough. It is time you should think of yourself. If you ask
for a donation for _yourself_, I will give it to you; but I will not
help you to rob yourself for others."
Harriet's charity for all the human race is unbounded. It embraces even
the slaveholder--it sympathizes even with Jeff. Davis, and rejoices at
his departure to other lands, with some prospect of peace for the
future. She says, "I tink dar's many a slaveholder'll git to Heaven. Dey
don't know no better. Dey acts up to de light dey hab. You take dat
sweet little child (pointing to a lonely baby)--'pears more like an
angel dan anyting else--take her down dere, let her nebber know nothing
'bout niggers but they was made to be whipped, an' she'll grow up to use
the whip on 'em jus' like de rest. No, Missus, its because dey don't
know no better." May God give the people to whom the story of this woman
shall come, a like charity, so that through their kindness the last days
of her stormy and troubled life may be calm and peaceful.
WOMAN-WHIPPING,
ETHICALLY AND ESTHETICALLY CONSIDERED.
BY S. M. HOPKINS,
PROFESSOR IN THE AUBURN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY.
ESSAY ON WOMAN-WHIPPING.
The subject of the preceding memoir appears to have retained all her
life a feeling recollection of the effects of the whip in the hands of
her youthful mistress. Considering the vigor and frequency of the
application, this is not strange. Infinite cuffs and thwacks, more or
less, pass into oblivion; but a flogging with a raw-hide is not easily
forgotten. A slave's experience of the whip, however, was not confined
to his or to _her_ early days. A slave race must be controlled by fear
and pain: and the discipline, it was naturally thought, could not begin
too early. From childhood to old age they were liable to stripes, for
any reason or for no reason. If the slave was guilty of no fault, he
might be whipped, as appears from the preceding narrative, merely to
impress him with a salutary sense of the master's right and disposition
to whip.
A Northern man, born and bred under the influences of freedom and the
protection of law, and made acquainted with slavery in its old palmy
days, can never forget his sensations at his first sight of a
slave-whipping. The utmost he has ever seen in the way of corporal
punishment has been the switching of some obstreperous child by
competent authority; a discipline administered with prudence and
moderation; drawing no blood and leaving no scar. He now sees an adult
person stripped to the skin, his arms tied at their utmost stretch above
his head, or across some object which binds him into a posture the best
adapted to feel the full force of each blow. The instrument of suffering
is not a birch twig or a ferule, but a twisted raw-hide, or heavy "black
snake;" either of them highly effective weapons in the hands of a stout
executioner. Our Northern novice stands horror-stricken and paralyzed
for a moment; but at the second or third blow, and the piteous scream of
_Oh Lord! Massa!_ which follows, he digs his fingers into his ears, and
rushes to the furthest corner of his tent or dwelling, to escape the
scene. Even if he _could_ have endured the sight and sound a while
longer, he dared not. The horror in his face, and perhaps the
irrepressible word or act of interference was too sure to bring upon
himself the vengeance due to a "d--d Abolitionist." The little knot of
Southern _habitués_ look on with critical inspection, squirting
tobacco-juice, with their hands in their pockets.
If the subject is a woman, the interest rises higher, and the crowd
would be greater. There is a refinement of cruelty in the whipping of a
woman which used to stimulate agreeably the dull sensibilities of a
Southern mob. A dish of torture had to be peppered very high to please
the palates of those epicures in brutality. The helplessness and terror
of the victim, the exposure of her person, the opportunity for coarse
jests at her expense, all combined to make it a scene of rare enjoyment.
How the "chivalric" mind can endure the loss of such gratifications it
is difficult to conceive. The Romans were weaned from crucifixions and
gladiatorial combats very gradually. The process of ameliorating
criminal law and humanizing public sentiment went on for more than two
centuries. It was full four hundred years after the epoch of our
redemption when the monk Telemachus threw himself between the hired
swordsmen, whom a Christian audience was applauding, and laid down his
own life to wind up the spectacle. But the bloody morsel has been
snatched from the mouths of the "chivalry" at one clutch. No wonder
their mortification vents itself in weeping and wailing, and knashing
of teeth, and in such miscellaneous atrocities as their "Ku-Klux-Klans"
can venture to inflict on helpless freedmen and radicals.[2]
A recent Southern paper (the _Virginia Advertiser_) finds a providential
provision for the enslavement of the negro race in the thickness of
their skulls, enabling them to bear without injury the blows inflicted
in sudden rage by their masters; a suggestive confession, by the way, of
the influence of slavery on the tempers of the slaveholders. The whole
race must be prepared, it seems, for blows on the head with whatever
weapon came to hand! But admitting the thickness of the skulls, it
appears from an incident in the preceding pages, as well as from other
known instances, that the inventive genius of the slave-whipping
chivalry contrived to baffle the humane designs of Providence--a negro
skull well padded with wool might bear without injury the blow of a
boot-jack or a hammer, and yet prove insufficient to resist the impact
of a musket-ball or a ten-pound weight. It is of no avail to plate a
vessel with six inches of iron, if she is to be pounded with bolts that
can mash an eight-inch armor. Apparently, Divine Providence stopped
short of the necessary security for the predestined slave race. It
should have arranged for a progressive thickening of the negro cranium
to meet the increase of violence on the part of the master; until at
length slavery might be encountered with a difficulty like that which
besets naval gunnery, viz., what would be the result if an infrangible
African skull should be beaten by an irresistable Caucasian club?
But even this Virginia _laudator temporis acti_, this melancholy mourner
at the tomb of defunct slavery, does not allege any such Providential
thickening of the negro cuticle as to amount to a satisfactory anæthesis
against whipping. It has never been proven that a Virginia paddle or a
Georgia raw-hide well applied did not make the blood spirt as freely
through a black skin as through a white one; nor has any Southern savant
of the Nott and Gliddon school shown that there was not the same
_relative_ delicacy of organization in the slave woman as in the free. A
black woman was, relatively to the black man, the more delicate subject
for the whip; something more sensitive to the shame of stripping, more
liable to terror, and of rather softer fiber; so that the lash went
deeper both into soul and sense than in the case of her sable brother.
And this fact made the black woman a very suitable subject for the whip
in the hands of the Southern lady. To succeed in slave-whipping as in
any other fine art, the Horatian canon must be regarded, which requires
us to take a subject suited to our strength. It would have been
unreasonable, in ordinary cases, to expect a "dark-eyed daughter of the
South" to flog handsomely a stalwart negro man; she sometimes did it,
after he had been well tied up. But the slave girl was exactly suited to
her flagellating capacities. A good many women, North as well as South,
manifest a tendency to become tyrants in their own households, and love
to bully their servants. But this is an evil of a mitigated nature in
Northern society. The stupidest "help" in the kitchen knows she is safe