Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman
from any other lash than her mistress' tongue, and is commonly an adept
at the business of answering back again.
But the Southern mistress was a domestic devil with horns and claws;
selfish, insolent, accustomed to be waited on for everything. She grew
up with the instinct of tyranny--to punish violently the least neglect
or disobedience in her servants. The variable temper of girlhood, not
ugly unless thwarted, became in the "Southern matron" a chronic fury.
She was her own "overseer," and, like that out-door functionary, had her
own scepter, which she did not bear in vain. The raw-hide lay upon the
shelf within easy reach, and her arm was vigorous with exercise. The
breaking of a plate, the spilling of a cup, the misplacing of a pin in
her dress, or any other misadventure in the chapter of accidents, was
promptly illustrated with numerous cuts. The lash well laid on the
shoulders of a black _femme-de-chambre_, or screaming child, was an
agreeable titillation of the nervous sensibilities of the languid
creole; a headache, or a heartache, transferred itself through the
medium of the raw-hide to the back of Phillis or Araminta. They no doubt
whipped sometimes, like Mr. Squeers, for the mere fun of the thing. It
is an exquisite pleasure to a cowardly nature to have some creature to
torment; and there is this nemesis about cruelty that it engenders an
appetite which, like that for alcoholic stimulents, for ever demands
increased indulgence. It was the vindictive woman's nature in the South
that protracted and gave added ferocity to the rebellion. These
woman-whipping wives and mothers it was who hounded on the masculine
chivalry to the work of exterminating the "accursed Yankees," and thus
made their own punishment so much sorer than it need have been.
The mention of these amiable Southern characteristics cannot fail to
recall that highly suggestive scene of the Malebolge, with the
illustration of Gustave Doré, in which the tempters and destroyers of
women are seen scourged with Whips, in the hands of demons; especially
when we remember that the whipping of slave women to make them consent
to their own dishonor, was one of the usages of the patriarchal
chivalry. There is not a scene in which the imaginings of Dante have
been better seconded by the pencil of the great French artist: the
flying wretches hurrying in opposite directions, as the crowds in the
Jubilee year trampled each other, going and returning across the St.
Angelo Bridge; among them the bat-winged fiends with whips, lashing
right and left! In the throng are female figures: women who in life
tortured and corrupted other women. What terror in face and attitude!
How desperately they grapple with the rocks to lift themselves out of
reach of the scourge! And these two demons in the foreground! What an
absolute idealization of muscular ferocity! Every sinewy line in their
cantour displays the force of a fallen demi-god; their very tails curl
with delight in their ministry of vengeance.
Ahi; come facen levar le berze,
Alle prime percosse, e gia nessuno,
Le second aspettava ne le terze!
Ah! how they make them skip! There is Legree and Tom Gordon, and Madame
de Schlangenbad, from Louisiana, and Mrs. Crawley (_née_ Sharp) from
South Carolina, squirming under the torture! A very instructive, if not
agreeable exhibition!
But this fury in celestial Southern bosoms was merely institutional. Dip
the gentlest nature into the element of irresponsible power, and it
becomes in time covered over with a foul incrustation of cruelty. Those
beastly Roman ladies of Juvenal's time, who could order a slave woman to
be whipped to death without condescending to give any other reason than
their _sic volo, sic jubeo_, were not naturally worse than others. Take
any Roman or Southern girl of ten years of age, put a whip in her hands,
and a helpless slave child at her mercy; let her see nothing but
brutality to inferiors all around her, and by the time she is ready to
be married, she can hold up her thumb to the standing gladiator in the
arena, or beg her lover to bring her back from Bull Run a ring from the
bones of some Yankee soldier. It is a publicly known private fact,
illustrative of the influence of slavery on the female character, that
when a certain Northern clergyman applied to her father for the hand of
a celebrated Maryland heiress, the reply was, "You are quite welcome to
her! but I think it only fair to tell you that if I were going to storm
hell, I should put her in the advance."
There is every reason to hope, therefore, that the Southern character,
both male and female, will become gradually ameliorated by the changed
condition under which it will hereafter be formed. It is a common error,
one in which the Southern people themselves share, that there is
something in their climate to nurse and to justify their "high spirit,"
_anglicé_ their quarrelsomeness and brutality of temper. It is very
pleasant to lay off upon Nature or Providence what belongs only to will
or institutions. A man indulges in violent passions with little
restraint or remorse, so long as he can persuade himself he is merely
what certain positive natural laws make him. What an opiate for a
conscience defiled with lust and blood, to think that this is only
natural to the "sunny South." But in fact, the people of warm,
temperate, and tropical regions are most commonly gentle of mood; the
climate acts as an anodyne, and soothes them into a peaceful equilibrium
of the passions. The negroes of the Southern States are not passionate
or vindictive--well for their late masters and present persecutors that
they are not! What they may become from the treatment they are
experiencing from those preternatural and predestinated fools, is
another question.
The only reason the "chivalry" are bad-tempered and quarrelsome, is
found in that despotism in which they have been nursed, and which
associates the idea of personal dignity with an instant resort to
violence at any contradiction. But for slavery, the people of
Mississippi would have been no more addicted to street fights, dueling,
midnight assassinations, etc., than the people of Massachusetts. That
the former have any advantage in respect to courage, has been
sufficiently disproved by the rebellion. Whether the ex-Confederate
ladies may or may not be able to "fire the Southern heart" for another
attempt to overthrow the Government, it will at least never be done
under the persuasion that one Southerner is equal to five or any other
number above unity, of Yankees.
The traditions of slavery, indeed, will remain to keep alive among the
late slaveholding caste, the insolent and unchristian temper on which
they have prided themselves. But having no more helpless dependants to
storm at and abuse, their valor will needs submit to gradual
modifications. Some degree of self-government will become a necessity.
It may require several generations; but _institutions_ ceasing to
corrupt them, the loss of wealth, the necessity of work and a new Gospel
of peace, better than their old slaveholding Christianity, will
gradually educate them into a law-abiding, orderly, and virtuous people.
The Southern woman will of course share early in this beneficent
change--no longer perverted into a she-devil by the possession of
unrestrained power, and paying just wages to servants, who, if not
suited with their work, can leave without having to run off; her gentler
virtues will have a chance to assert themselves. Her striking qualities
will subside into a charming vivacity of temper. She will become a
gracious and pious mater-familias; she will perhaps in time learn to
apply to her own children a portion of that discipline of which her
slaves enjoyed a monopoly. In short, there neither is nor ever was any
reason, slavery excepted, why the Southern whites should not possess a
character for industry, peacefulness, and religion, equal to that of
the rural districts of New York and New England.
Thank God that we have lived to see such awful barbarisms extinct! In
fifty years the last woman-whipper at the South will be as dead as
Cleopatra; as dead as the pre-Adamite brute organizations. History will
be ashamed to record their doings. The fictions in which they are
enbalmed will be lost in the better coming era of morals and letters. By
the time the South has been overflowed and regenerated by a beneficent
inundation of Northern "carpet-baggers," with Yankee capital and
enterprise, it will be forgotten that a race capable of the crimes
referred to in the preceding story, ever existed.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] It is curiously illustrative of the mixed childishness and ferocity
which characterizes the Southern civilization, that this secret
association of ruffians, organized to terrorize the loyal South, styles
itself by an absurd, mis-spelled name, and goes about on its nightly
work of murder in harlequin costume, with one of its leaders acting the
part of ghost, to frighten the superstitious blacks. Some more
courageous freedman occasionally makes a _bona fide_ ghost of this
masquerade.
LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS
TO THE
PUBLISHING FUND.
GERRIT SMITH, Peterboro, N. Y., $25 00
WENDELL PHILLIPS, Boston, Mass., 25 00
J. S. SEYMOUR, Auburn, N. Y., 25 00
D. M. OSBORNE, " " 25 00
CHAS. P. WOOD, " " 25 00
WM. H. SEWARD, JR., " " 25 00
J. N. KNAPP, " " 25 00
RUFUS SARGENT, " " 25 00
H. IVISON, New York 25 00
TIMOTHY L. BARKER, San Francisco, Cal., 20 00
WM. G. WISE, Auburn, N. Y., 10 00
G. I. LETCHWORTH, " " 10 00
S. L. BRADLEY " " 10 00
I. F. TERRILL " " 10 00
ABIJAH FITCH, " " 10 00
T. M. POMEROY, M. C., " " 10 00
F. L. GRISWOLD, " " 10 00
CYRENUS WHEELER, " " 10 00
JOHN CHEDELL, " " 10 00
DAVID WRIGHT, " " 10 00
JOSIAH BARBER, " " 10 00
GEO. E. BARBER, " " 10 00
S. WILLARD, M. D., " " 10 00
RICHARD STEEL, " " 5 00
C. H. MERRIMAN, " " 5 00
J. LEWIS GRANT, " " 5 00
A. H. GOSS, " " 5 00
CHRISTOPHER MORGAN, " " 5 00
J. M. HURD, " " 5 00
W. J. SUTTON, " " 5 00
WM. A. KIRBY, " " 5 00
THOS. MCCREA, " " 5 00
J. N. STARIN, " " 5 00
C. P. FORD, " " 5 00