probably send the wretches away, as they could not be sure but that there were gentlemen in the house. Her mistress, however, positively ordered her to let the people in without delay. Mum Bett obeyed the order with much unwillingness. She appeared at the door with a large kitchen shovel in one hand and a light in the other, and assured the strangers that they would find nothing of what they asked for; neither Judge Sedgwick, nor ammunition and prisoners. They chose to search the house, however, as she had expected. Her great fear was that they would drink themselves intoxicated in the cellar, and become unmanageable; and she had prepared for this by putting rows of porter bottles in front of the wine and spirits, having drawn the corks to let the porter get flat, and put them in again. The intruders offered to take the light from her hand, but she held it back, saying that no one should carry the light but herself. Here was the way to the cellars, and there was the way to the chambers: she would light the gentlemen wherever they chose to go, but she would not let the house be set on fire over her sick mistress's head. "The gentlemen" went down to the cellar first. One of the party broke the neck of a bottle of porter, for which she rebuked him, saying, that if they wished to drink, she would fetch the corkscrew, and draw the cork, and they might drink like gentlemen; but that, if any one broke the neck of another bottle, she would lay him low with her shovel.
The flat porter was not to the taste of the visiters, who made wry faces, and said, if gentlemen liked such cursed bitter stuff, they might keep it, and praised spirits in comparison; upon which Mum Bett coolly observed that they were "sort o' gentlemen that lived here that did not drink spirits."
At the foot of the cellar stairs stood a barrel of pickled pork, out of which the intruders began helping themselves. In a tone of utter scorn Mum Bett exclaimed, "Ammunition and prisoners, indeed! You come for ammunition and prisoners, and take up with pickled pork!" They were fairly ashamed, and threw back the pork into the barrel. They went through all the chambers, poking with their bayonets under the beds, lest Judge Sedgwick should be there. At last, to Mum Bett's sorrow, they decided to search the garrets. In hers the iron chest came into view.
She hoped in vain that they would pass it over. One of the party observed that it looked as if it held something. Mum Bett put down the light, kneeled on the chest, and brandished her weapon, saying, "This is my chist, and let any man touch it at his peril." The men considered the matter not worth contesting, and went down stairs. They were actually departing without having met with a single article of value enough to carry away, when a young lady, a niece of Judge Sedgwick's, wishing to be civil to the wretches, asked them, at the hall door, whether they would like to see the stables. They were glad of the hint, and stole one horse (if I remember right), and ruined another with hard riding. Mum Bett's expression of wrath was, "If I had thought the pesky fools would have done such a thing, I would have turned the horses loose over night in the meadow; they would have come back at my call in the morning."
She was considered as connected with Judge Sedgwick's family after she had left their house for a home of her own. By her great industry and frugality she supported a large family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There was nothing remarkable about her husband, and her descendants do not appear to have inherited her genius. Mum Bett lies in the Stockbridge graveyard, in the corner where the people of colour _lie apart_. Her epitaph, written by a son of Judge Sedgwick, is as follows:-- ELIZABETH FREEMAN, Known by the name of MUM BETT, Died December 28, 1829. Her supposed age was 85 years.
She was born a slave, and remained a slave for nearly thirty years: she could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal: she neither wasted time nor property: she never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend.
GOOD MOTHER FAREWELL.
As far as energy and talent are concerned, I should not hesitate to say that in her own sphere Mum Bett "had no superior nor equal;" and the same may be said about the quality of fidelity. I know of a slave in Louisiana who picked up a parcel containing 10,000 dollars, and returned it, with much trouble, to its owner. I know of a slave in South Carolina, belonging to a physician, who drives his master's gig, and has made a wonderful use of what he sees in the course of his morning's duty. While waiting for his master at the doors of patients, this slave occupied himself with copying in the sandy soil the letters he saw on signs. When he believed he had caught the method, he begged a slate, or paper and pencil, and brought home his copies, coaxing the boys of the family to tell him the names of the letters. He then put them together, and thus learned to read and write, without any further help whatever.
Having once discovered his own power of doing and learning, he went on in the only direction which seemed open to him. He turned his attention to mechanism, and makes miniature violins and pianos of surprising completeness, but no use. Here he will most likely stop; for there is no probability of his ever ceasing to be a slave, or having opportunity to turn to practical account a degree of energy, patience, and skill which, in happier circumstances, might have been the instruments of great deeds.
The energies of slaves sometimes take a direction which their masters contrive to render profitable, when they take to religion as a pursuit.
The universal, unquenchable reverence for religion in the human mind is taken advantage of when the imagination of the slave has been turned into the channel of superstition. It is a fact, that in the newspapers of New-Orleans may be seen an advertisement now and then of a lot of "pious negroes." Such "pious negroes" are convenient on a plantation where the treatment is not particularly mild; as they consider nonresistance a Christian duty, and are able to inspire a wonderful degree of patience into their fellow-sufferers.
The vigour which negroes show when their destiny is fairly placed in their own hands, is an answer to all arguments about their helplessness drawn from their dulness in a state of bondage. A highly satisfactory experiment upon the will, judgment, and talents of a large body of slaves was made a few years ago by a relative of Chief-justice Marshall.
This gentleman and his family had attached their negroes to them by a long course of judicious kindness. At length an estate at some distance was left to the gentleman, and he saw, with much regret, that it was his duty to leave the plantation on which he was living. He could not bear the idea of turning over his people to the tender mercies or unproved judgment of a stranger overseer. He called his negroes together, told them the case, and asked whether they thought they could manage the estate themselves. If they were willing to undertake the task, they must choose an overseer from among themselves, provide comfortably for their own wants, and remit him the surplus of the profits. The negroes were full of grief at losing the family, but willing to try what they could do. They had an election for overseer, and chose the man their master would have pointed out; decidedly the strongest head on the estate. All being arranged, the master left them, with a parting charge to keep their festivals, and take their appointed holydays as if he were present. After some time he rode over to see how all went on, choosing a festival day, that he might meet them in their holyday gayety. He was surprised, on approaching, to hear no merriment; and, on entering his fields, he found his "force" all hard at work. As they flocked round him, he inquired why they were not making holyday. They told him that the crop would suffer in its present state by the loss of a day, and that they had therefore put off their holyday, which, however, they meant to take by-and-by. Not many days after an express arrived to inform the proprietor that there was an insurrection on his estate. He would not believe it; declared it impossible, as there was nobody to rise against; but the messenger, who had been sent by the neighbouring gentlemen, was so confident of the facts, that the master galloped, with the utmost speed, to his plantation, arriving as night was coming on. As he rode in a cry of joy arose from his negroes, who pressed round to shake hands with him. They were in their holyday clothes, and had been singing and dancing. They were only enjoying the deferred festival. The neighbours, hearing the noise on a quiet working day, had jumped to the conclusion that it was an insurrection.
There is no catastrophe yet to this story. When the proprietor related it, he said that no trouble had arisen; and that for some seasons, ever since this estate had been wholly in the hands of his negroes, it had been more productive than it ever was while he managed it himself.
The finest harvest-field of romance perhaps in the world is the frontier between the United States and Canada. The vowed student of human nature could not do better than take up his abode there, and hear what fugitives and their friends have to tell. There have been no exhibitions of the forces of human character in any political revolution or religious reformation more wonderful and more interesting than may almost daily be seen there. The impression on even careless minds on the spot is very strong. I remember observing to a friend in the ferryboat, when we were crossing the Niagara from Lewistown to Queenstown, that it seemed very absurd, on looking at the opposite banks of the river, to think that, while the one belonged to the people who lived on it, the other was called the property of a nation three thousand miles off, the shores looking so much alike as they do. My friend replied with a smile, "Runaway slaves see a great difference." "That they do!" cried the ferryman, in a tone of the deepest earnestness. He said that the leap ashore of an escaped slave is a sight unlike any other that can be seen.
On other parts of the frontier I heard tales which I grieve that it is not in my power to tell, so honourable are they to individuals of both races, friends of the slaves. The time may come when no one will be injured by their being made public. Meantime, I will give one which happened many years ago, and which relates to a different part of the country.
A., now an elderly man, was accustomed in his youth to go up and down the Mississippi on trading expeditions; and both in these and in subsequent wanderings of many years--to Hayti among other places--he has had opportunity to study the character of the negro race; and he is decidedly of opinion that there is in them only a superinduced inferiority to the whites. In relating his experiences among the coloured people, he told the following story:-- When he was a young man, he was going down the Mississippi in a boat with a cargo of salt, when he stopped at a small place on the Kentucky shore called Unity, opposite to a part of Arkansas. While he was there a slavetrader came up with his company of upward of two hundred slaves, whom he was conveying to the New-Orleans market. Among these A. remarked a gigantic mulatto--handsome in countenance and proud in bearing--who was nearly naked, and fettered. He had an iron band round his waist and round each wrist, and these bands were connected by chains. The trader observed to A. that this man was the most valuable slave he had ever had on sale. I think he said that he would not take two thousand dollars for him; he added that he was obliged to chain him, as he was bent on getting away. When the trader's back was turned, the mulatto looked at A. as if wishing to talk with him.
"Why are you chained in this way?" asked A.
"Because my master is afraid of losing me. He knows that I am the most valuable slave he has, and that I mean to get away."
"Have you told him so?"
"Yes."
"And how do you mean to get away?"
"I don't know; but I mean it."
After a pause, he said in a low voice to A., "Could not you give me a file?"
"No," said A., decidedly. "Do you think I don't know the law? Do you think I am going to help you away, and get punished for it? No; I can't give you a file."
As A. went back to his boat he saw the slave looking wistfully after him, and his heart smote him for what he had said. He bethought himself that if he could manage to put an instrument of deliverance in the man's way without touching it, he might keep within the letter of the law, and he acted upon this notion. He looked about his boat, and found a strong three-sided file, which he put between his coat and waistcoat, so that it would be sure to drop out when the coat was unbuttoned. He sauntered back on shore, and the mulatto, who watched all his movements, came up to him, eagerly whispering, "Have you got a file? Are you going to give me a file?"
"No," said A. "I told you that I knew better than to give you a file."
The slave's countenance fell.
"However," continued A., "I should not wonder if I can tell you where to get one. If you look about by yonder woodpile, I think, perhaps, you may find a file. No, not now. Go back to your company now, and don't look at me; and, when I am gone on board my boat, you can wander off to the woodpile."
A. unbuttoned his coat as he appeared to be picking up the scattered wood round the pile, and presently returned to his boat, whence he saw the mulatto presently walk to the woodpile, and stoop down just at the right spot. A. watched all day and late into the night, but he saw and heard nothing more.
In the morning the slavetrader came on board the boat, exclaiming angrily that A. had a slave of his concealed there. A. desired him to search the boat, which he did, looking behind every bag of salt. He was confident that A. must have helped the man away; chained as he was, he could not have got off without help. As for himself, he had rather have lost thousands of dollars than this man; but he always knew it would be so; the fellow always said he would get away.
Thus grumbling, the trader departed to make search in another direction.
In an hour he returned, saying that the slave must either be drowned or have got over into Arkansas. His irons and a strong file were lying on a point of land projecting into the river about a mile off, and the marks were visible where the fugitive had taken the water. A. went, and long did he stay, questioning and meditating; and during all the years that have since elapsed, it has been his frequent daily and nightly speculation whether the mulatto escaped or perished. Sometimes, when he remembers the gigantic frame of the man, and the force of the impulse which urged him, A. hopes that it may have been possible for him to reach the opposite shore. At other times, when he thinks of the width of the Mississippi at that part, and of the tremendous force of the current, which would warrant the assertion that it is impossible for a swimmer to cross, he believes himself convinced that the fugitive has perished. Yet still the hope returns that the strong man may be living in wild freedom in some place where the sense of safety and peace may have taught him to forgive and pity his oppressors.
NEW-ORLEANS.
"Though everybody cried 'Shame!' and 'Shocking!' yet everybody visited them."--MISS EDGEWORTH.
When arrived at the extreme southwest point of our journey, it was amusing to refer to the warnings of our kind friends about its inconveniences and dangers. We had brought away tokens of the hospitality of Charleston in the shape of a large basket of provision which had been prepared, on the supposition that we should find little that we could eat on the road. There was wine, tea, and cocoa; cases of French preserved meat, crackers (biscuits), and gingerbread. All these good things, except the wine and crackers, we found it expedient to leave behind, from place to place. There was no use in determining beforehand to eat them at any particular meal; when it came to the point, we always found hunger or disgust so much more bearable than the shame of being ungracious to entertainers who were doing their best for us, that we could never bring ourselves to produce our stores. We took what was set before us, and found ourselves, at length, alive and well at New-Orleans.
At Mobile I met some relatives, who kindly urged my taking possession of their house at New-Orleans during my stay of ten days. I was thankful for the arrangement, as the weather was becoming hot, and we could secure more leisure and repose in a house of our own than in a boarding-house or as the guests of a family. With the house we were, of course, to have the services of my friend's slaves. He told me something of their history. He had tried all ways to obtain good service, and could not succeed. He had attempted wages, treating his people like free servants, &c., and all in vain. His present plan was promising them freedom and an establishment in a free state after a short term of years in case of good desert. He offered to take care of the money they earned during their leisure hours, and to pay them interest upon it, but they preferred keeping it in their own hands. One of them sewed up 150 dollars in her bed; she fell ill, and the person who nursed her is supposed to have got the money; for, when the poor slave recovered, her earnings were gone.
We left Mobile for New-Orleans on the 24th of April. The portion of forest which we crossed in going down from Mobile to the coast was the most beautiful I had seen. There was fresh grass under foot, and the woods were splendid with myrtles, magnolias, and many shrubs whose blossoms were new to me and their names unknown. We had plenty of time to look about us; for the hack which carried the four passengers whom the stage would not contain broke down every half hour, and the stage company had to stop till it could proceed. We had an excellent dinner in the gallery of a loghouse in the midst of the forest, where we were plentifully supplied with excellent claret. There had been showers all day, with intervals of sunshine, but towards sunset the settled gloom of the sky foreboded a night of storm. I was on the watch for the first sight of the Gulf of Mexico. I traced the line where the forest retires to give place to the marsh, and the whole scene assumes a sudden air of desolation. At this moment the thunder burst, sheets of lightning glared over the boiling sea, and the rain poured down in floods. Our umbrellas were found to be broken, of course; and we had to run along the pier to the steamboat in such a rain as I was never before exposed to; but it was well worth while getting wet for such a first sight of the Gulf of Mexico. It soon grew dark; and, before morning, we were in Lake Pontchartrain, so that this stormy view of the gulf was the only one we had.
We amused ourselves in the morning with tracing the dim shores of the State of Mississippi to the north, and of Louisiana to the west. About nine o'clock we arrived in sight of the long piers which stretch out from the swamp into the lake, the mudcraft, the canoes, with blacks fishing for crabs; the baths, and the large Washington hotel, with its galleries and green blinds, built for coolness, where gentlemen from New-Orleans go to eat fish and bathe. Next we saw the train of railroad cars waiting for us; and, without the loss of a moment's time, we were whirled away to the city, five miles in a quarter of an hour. I have expressed elsewhere[16] my admiration of the swamp through which our road lay; an admiration which faded as we traversed the lower faubourg, and died away in the Champs Elysées. Before ten o'clock we were breaking the seals of our English letters in the drawing-room of our temporary home.
Footnote 16: "Society in America," vol. ii., p. 179.
When we had satisfied ourselves with home news, unpacked, dressed, and lunched, we took our seats by the window in the intervals of visits from callers. All was very new, very foreign in its aspect. Many of the ladies in the streets wore caps or veils instead of bonnets; the negroes who passed shouted their very peculiar kind of French; and everything seemed to tell us that we had plunged into the dogdays. I never knew before how impressions of heat can be conveyed through the eye. The intensity of glare and shadow in the streets, and the many evidences that the fear of heat is the prevailing idea of the place, affect the imagination even more than the scorching power of the sun does the bodily frame.
I was presented with a pamphlet written by a physician, which denies the unhealthiness of New-Orleans as strenuously as some of its inhabitants deny its immorality. To me it appears that everything depends on what is understood by Morals and Health. As to the morals of the city, I have elsewhere stated the principal facts on which my unfavourable judgment is founded.[17] In regard to another department of morals, the honourable fact of the generous charity of New-Orleans to strangers should be stated. Great numbers of sick and destitute foreigners are perpetually thrown upon the mercy of the inhabitants, and that mercy is unbounded. I have reason to believe that the sick are not merely nursed and cured, but provided with funds before departing. When I visited the hospital, it contained two hundred and fifty patients, not above fifty of whom were Americans. As to the health of the place, I believe the average is good among that portion of the population which can afford to remove northward for the hot months; but very low if the total white population be included. The pamphlet which I read argues that, though the fever is very destructive during a portion of the year, mortality from other diseases is much below the common average; that the variations of temperature are slight, though frequent; and that the average of children and old persons is high. All this may be true; but a place must be called peculiarly unhealthy whose inhabitants are compelled, on pain of death, to remove for three or four months of every year. Instead of arguing against such a fact as this, many citizens are hoping and striving to put an end to the necessity of such a removal.
They hope, by means of draining and paving, to render their city habitable all the year round. Plans of drainage are under consideration, and I saw some importations of paving-stones. The friends of the New-Orleans people can hardly wish them a greater good than the success of such attempts; for the perpetual shifting about which they are subjected to by the dread of the fever is a serious evil to sober families of an industrious, domestic turn. It is very injurious to the minds of children and to the habits of young people, and a great hardship to the aged. I was struck with a remark which fell from a lady about her children's exercise in the open air. She said that she always took them out when the wind blew from over the lake, and kept them at home in warm weather when it blew from any other quarter, as it then only made them "more languid" to go out. This did not tend to confirm the doctrine of the pamphlet; but I was not surprised at the remark when I looked abroad over the neighbouring country from the top of the hospital. Thence I saw the marsh which was given to Lafayette, and which he sold, not long before his death, to a London firm, who sold it again.
On this marsh, most of which was under water, the city of New-Orleans was begun. A strip of buildings was carried to the river bank, where the city spread.
In the midst of the flooded lots of ground stood the gas-works; surrounded by stagnant ponds lay the Catholic cemetery. The very churches of the city seemed to spring up out of the water. The blossomy beauties of the swamp could not be seen at this height, and all looked hideously desolate in the glaring sun. The view from the turret of the Cotton-press is much more advantageous. It commands many windings of the majestic river, and the point where it seems to lose itself in the distant forest; while below appears everything that is dry in all the landscape: the shipping, the Levée, the busy streets of the city, and the shady avenues of the suburbs.
The ladies of New-Orleans walk more than their countrywomen of other cities, from the streets being in such bad order as to make walking the safest means of locomotion. The streets are not very numerous; they are well distinguished, and lie at right angles, and their names are clearly printed up; so that strangers find no difficulty in going about, except when a fall of rain has made the crossings impassable. The heat is far less oppressive in the streets than in the open country, as there is generally a shady side. We were never kept within doors by the heat, though summer weather had fairly set in before our arrival. We made calls, and went shopping and sight-seeing, much as we do in London; and, moreover, walked to dinner visits, to the theatre, and to church, while the sun was blazing as if he had drawn that part of the world some millions of miles nearer to himself than that in which we had been accustomed to live. It is in vain to attempt describing what the moonlight is like. We walked under the long rows of Pride-of-India trees on the Ramparts, amid the picturesque low dwellings of the Quadroons, and almost felt the glow of the moonlight, so warm, so golden, so soft as I never saw it elsewhere. We were never tired of watching the lightning from our balcony, flashing through the first shades of twilight, and keeping the whole heaven in night-long conflagration. The moschetoes were a great and perpetual plague, except while we were asleep. We found our moscheto-curtains a sufficient protection at night; but we had to be on the watch against these malicious insects all day, and to wage war against them during the whole evening. Many ladies are accustomed, during the summer months, to get after breakfast into a large sack of muslin tied round the throat, with smaller sacks for the arms, and to sit thus at work or book, fanning themselves to protect their faces. Others sit all the morning on the bed, within their moscheto-curtains. I wore gloves and prunella boots all day long, but hands and feet were stung through all the defences I could devise. After a while the sting of the moscheto ceases to irritate more than the English gnat-sting; but, to strangers, the suffering is serious; to those of feverish habit, sometimes dangerous.
Sunday is the busiest day of the week to the stranger in New-Orleans.
There is first the negro market to be seen at five o'clock. We missed this sight, as the mornings were foggy, and it was accounted unsafe to go out in the early damp. Then there is the Cathedral to be attended, a place which the European gladly visits, as the only one in the United States where all men meet together as brethren. As he goes, the streets are noisy with traffic. Some of those who keep the Sunday sit at their doors or windows reading the newspapers or chatting with their acquaintance. Merchants are seen hastening to the counting-house or the wharf, or busy in the stores. Others are streaming into the church doors. There are groups about the cathedral gates, the blacks and the whites parting company as if they had not been worshipping side by side.
Within the edifice there is no separation. Some few persons may be in pews; but kneeling on the pavement may be seen a multitude, of every shade of complexion, from the fair Scotchwoman or German to the jet-black pure African. The Spanish eye flashes from beneath the veil; the French Creole countenance, painted high, is surmounted by the neat cap or the showy bonnet; while between them may be thrust a gray-headed mulatto, following with his stupid eyes the evolutions of the priest; or the devout negro woman telling her beads--a string of berries--as if her life depended on her task. During the preaching, the multitude of anxious faces, thus various in tint and expression, turned up towards the pulpit, afforded one of those few spectacles which are apt to haunt the whole future life of the observer like a dream. Several Protestants spoke to me of the Catholic religion as being a great blessing to the ignorant negro, viewing a ritual religion as a safe resting-place between barbarism and truth. Nothing that I saw disposed me to agree with them. I saw among Catholics of this class only the most abject worship of things without meaning, and no comprehension whatever of symbols. I was persuaded that, if a ritual religion be ever a good, it is so in the case of the most, not the least, enlightened; of those who accept the ritual as symbolical, and not of those who pay it literal worship. I could not but think that, if the undisguised story of Jesus were presented to these last as it was to the fishermen of Galilee and the peasants on the reedy banks of Jordan, they would embrace a Christianity, in comparison with which their present religion is an unintelligible and effectual mythology. But such a primitive Christianity they, as slaves, never will and never can have, as its whole spirit is destructive of slavery.
Half a year before my visit to New-Orleans, a great commotion had been raised in the city against a Presbyterian clergyman, the Rev. Joel Parker, on account of some expressions which he had been reported to have used, while on a visit in New-England, respecting the morals of New-Orleans, and especially the desecration of the Sunday. Some meddlesome person had called a public meeting, to consider what should be done with the Rev. Joel Parker for having employed his constitutional freedom of speech in declaring what almost everybody knew or believed to be true. Many gentlemen of the city were vexed at this encroachment upon the liberty of the citizen, and at the ridicule which such apparent sensitiveness about reputation would bring upon their society; and they determined to be present at the meeting, and support the pastor's rights. Matters were proceeding fast towards a condemnation of the accused and a sentence of banishment, when these gentlemen demanded that he should be heard in his own defence, a guarantee for his personal safety being first passed by the meeting. This was agreed to, and Mr.
Parker appeared on the hustings. Unfortunately, he missed the opportunity--a particularly favourable one--of making a moral impression which would never have been lost. A full declaration of what he had said, the grounds of it, and his right to say it, would have turned the emotions of the assemblage, already softened in his favour, towards himself and the right. As it was, he did nothing wrong, except in as far as that he did nothing very right; but there was a want of judgment and taste in his address which was much to be regretted. He was allowed to go free for the time; but the newspapers reported all the charges against him, suppressed his replies, and lauded the citizens for not having pulled the offender to pieces; and Mr. Parker's congregation were called upon, on the ground of the resolutions passed at the public meeting, to banish their pastor. They refused, and appealed to all the citizens to protect them from such oppression as was threatened. No further steps were taken, I believe, against the pastor and his people; his church flourished under this little gust of persecution; and, when I was there, a handsome new edifice was rising up to accommodate the increased number of his congregation. I wished to hear this gentleman, and was glad to find that his flock met, while the building was going on, in the vestry of the new church; a spacious crypt, which was crowded when he preached. I had not expected much from his preaching, and was therefore taken by surprise by the exceeding beauty of his discourse; beauty, not of style, but spirit. The lofty and tender earnestness of both his sentiments and manner put the observer off his watch about the composition of the sermon. I was surprised to perceive in conversation afterward tokens that Mr. Parker was not a highly-educated man. I was raised by the lofty tone of his preaching far above all critical vigilance.
I had much opportunity of seeing in the United States what is the operation of persecution on strong and virtuous minds, and I trust the lesson of encouragement will never be lost. As it is certain that the progression of the race must be carried on through persecution of some kind and degree; as it is clear that the superior spirits to whom the race owes its advancement must, by their very act of anticipation, get out of the circle of general intelligence and sympathy, and be thus subject to the trials of spiritual solitude and social enmity--since thus it has ever been, and thus, by the laws of human nature, it must ever be--it is heart-cheering and soul-staying to perceive that the effects of persecution may be, and often are, more blessed than those of other kinds of discipline. Many quail under the apprehension of persecution; some are soured by it; but some pass through the suffering, the bitter suffering of popular hatred, with a strength which intermits less and less, and come out of it with new capacities for enjoyment, with affections which can no longer be checked by want of sympathy, and with an object in life which can never be overthrown. Mr. Parker's case was not one of any high or permanent character; though, as far as his trial went, it seemed to have given calmness and vigour to his mind. (I judge from his manner of speaking of the affair to me.) The abolitionists are the persons I have had, and always shall have, chiefly in view in speaking of the effects of persecution. They often reminded me of the remark, that you may know a philanthropist in the streets by his face. The life, light, and gentleness of their countenances, the cheerful earnestness of their speech, and the gayety of their manners, were enough to assure the unprejudiced foreign observer of the integrity of their cause and the blessedness of their pilgrim lives.
The afternoon or evening Sunday walk in New Orleans cannot fail to convince the stranger of the truth of the sayings of Mr. Parker, for which he afterward was subjected to so fierce a retribution. Whatever may be thought of the duty or expediency of a strict observance of the Sunday, no one can contend that in this city the observance is strict.
In the market there is traffic in meat and vegetables, and the groups of foreigners make a Babel of the place with their loud talk in many