The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 48
Hitherto, during my journey southward, the excitement of the various adventures through which I had passed, as well as the occupation which I had found for my thoughts in revisiting the scenes of my youth, under circumstances so changed, had kept my mind from dwelling upon the hopelessness of the search which I had undertaken. Augusta, in the state of Georgia, was the last point to which, in my researches many years before, I had been able to trace my wife and child. It was now some twenty years since they had entered that town as part of a slave coffle destined for the south-western market. This was the last trace Thad of them. To Augusta, therefore, I now directed my course, not, however, without the most depressing feelings, and a painful consciousness that when I reached that place, I should be without the slightest clew to guide me any farther.
I left Charleston in the stage coach for Augusta, long before daylight. As the day began to dawn, I found myself one of four passengers. At first we were pretty silent, each trying to sleep in his corner, or else eyeing his fellow-passengers, as if wishing to ascertain their character before making any advances towards acquaintance. At breakfast we began to thaw out a little, and by dinner time we were quite sociable.
It presently appeared that two of the passengers were northern men; one of them the editor of a New York newspaper, the other a Boston agent, employed in the purchase of cotton for some mercantile houses or manufacturing companies of that city. The third passenger was a person of very striking appearance, with a face of great intelligence, a dark eye that seemed to penetrate you at a glance, a captivating smile, manners exceedingly soft and winning, and something in his whole bearing that indicated a man accustomed to mingle freely in society.
He was evidently taken by the other two for a wealthy planter, and he neither did nor said any thing to contradict the assumption, receiving with an air of gracious condescension the court which they paid to him.
After a variety of topics, the conversation, as is common in America, settled down upon politics, and especially upon the nomination lately made for president and vice-president by a convention of the democratic or Jackson party assembled at Baltimore. Mr Van Buren, the nominee of that convention for the presidency, was very sharply criticized by the two northern men, on the ground, principally, that in a convention for revising the state constitution of New York, he had been in favor of allowing the blacks to vote. The planter, or supposed planter, adopted, in the course of the conversation, a non-committal course, which, according to the criticisms made on Mr Van Buren's character, might almost have rivalled the adroitness of that gentleman himself. The nomination of Mr Richard M. Johnson for the vice-presidency seemed to give still less satisfaction; indeed, it was mentioned that a portion of the members of the convention by which it was made had been greatly dissatisfied at it, and had refused to give it their support. Some hints that were dropped excited my curiosity as to the grounds of their opposition, and I followed up the matter by a good many questions. The opposition to Mr Johnson was made, I was told, by the delegation from Virginia. They did not object to the political orthodoxy of Mr Johnson, who, indeed, was a democrat of the first water, — to say the truth, so the New York editor told me, considerably too much of a democrat to suit the tastes of the Virginians. He was not respectable enough for them; quite too vulgar in his tastes and habits; and they had insisted upon nominating a certain Mr Rives in his place.
Upon my inquiring more specifically in what the vulgarity of Mr Johnson consisted, it came out that he entertained in his house a number of black and brown wives, and was the father of a family of colored children.
Very much to the surprise of my two northern fellow-passengers, who exhausted all their rhetoric in condemnation of Mr Johnson's coarseness and vulgarity, — a practical amalgamator for vice-president! — the supposed planter avowed himself a supporter of the Van Buren-Johnson nomination; and he undertook to offer some apologies for the latter gentleman.
"The horror of you northern people," he said, nodding his head to the Boston cotton broker, "and the hue and cry you have lately raised on the subject of amalgamation and the intermixture of the races, may be all very sincere, but for us in the south, with so many living evidences of our frailty multiplying about us in every direction, to attempt to make a bugbear of amalgamation, or to wink it into non-existence, by any ostrich-like process of sticking our heads into the sand, and refusing to recognize as a fact what every body knows, and what is testified to by the varying complexion of every considerable family of slaves in the country, is certainly a very great absurdity.
"For my part, I like to see a little consistency. We southerners defend slavery because, as we say, it is a law of nature that when two races are brought together in the same community, the stronger and nobler race should predominate over the weaker. But if, in such a case, it is the law of nature that the men of the weaker race should be made slaves of by those of the stronger, is it not just as much also a law of nature that the women of the weaker race should become concubines to the men of the stronger? Does not it always so operate? and is not that the means which nature takes gradually to extinguish the inferior race, and to substitute an improved, mixed race in the place of it?
"Some of us undertake to defend slavery out of the Bible, and to justify it by the example of the patriarchs. Very well; if the example of the patriarchs is to justify me in holding slaves, will it not also justify our democratic candidate for the vice-presidency in raising up to himself a family by the help of his maid servants?
"In fact, sir," said he, turning to me, who had taken an early opportunity to avow myself an Englishman, "it is precisely because our democratic candidate for the vice-presidency follows the example of the patriarchs a little too closely, that all this hue and cry is raised against him. "It is not his taste for black women, it is not his family of colored children, — perhaps these innocent gentlemen here from the north know nothing about the matter, but, if so, any white boy in the city of Charleston of sixteen years old and upwards could enlighten them, — it is not these little peccadilloes that reflect any thing upon Mr Johnson's character. They are as much parts of our domestic institutions here at the south as the use of the cowhide; just as natural to us southerners as chewing tobacco; just about as common, and just as little thought of. But the pinch is here. Mr. Johnson, being a bachelor, with no white wife or white children to control him, and, withal, one of the best-natured men in the world, must needs so far imitate the example of the patriarchs as actually to recognize a number of colored daughters as his own children. He has raised and educated them in his own house. He has even made efforts to introduce them into respectable society. The spirit of the Kentucky women — the women, you know, are all natural aristocrats — defeated Bim in that; but he has procured white husbands for them, and their children, under the law of Kentucky, will be legally white, and entitled to all the rights and privileges of white persons. It is this in which the scandal of Mr Johnson's conduct consists. If, instead of acting the affectionate father by his daughters, he had quietly shipped them all off to New Orleans to be sold at auction, to be made concubines of by the purchasers, instead of marrying them respectably, and securing for their children the full privileges of Kentucky citizenship, we should never have heard that brought against him, either north or south, as a reason why he ought not to be vice-president. I do not imagine that either of our northern friends here would have made the least objection to him on that score!"
"But you don't undertake to say," stammered out the Boston cotton broker, "that any respectable man at the south does that? That, I thought, was one of the slanders of the abolitionists."
"I do undertake to say," was the answer, "that a man may do it without any tarnish to his respectability, and if he should apply the next day after to be admitted a member of any of our most pious Christian churches, that would never be made a ground for refusing him. Church discipline is mighty strict in some matters. I once knew a man excommunicated from a Presbyterian church for sending his children to a dancing school; but I never yet heard of any southern church that ventured to inquire into the paternity of slave children, or the relations of female slaves towards their owners. The violent death of a slave by the hand of the owner may, under certain circumstances, lead to a judicial investigation more or less strict; but, short of that, a Turkish harem is not more safe from impertinent intrusions and inquiries, whether civil or ecclesiastical, than one of our slaveholding families. If-honest Dick Johnson had not acknowledged those children to be his, do you suppose that any body — unless perhaps by way of joke — would have ventured to charge them upon him? His offence consists not in having the children, but in owning them."
"I am afraid," said the New York editor, "you will give our English friend here," nodding at me, "rather a low idea of southern morals. There are some little family secrets that ought not to be spoken of before every body."
"Pity," said the other, "you had not thought of that before. In that case, you might have let Dick Johnson alone. All I insist upon is, that, bating the lack of a little hypocrisy and grimace, and making due allowance for a little extra good nature, he is not so very much worse than his neighbors."
"But," retorted the New York editor, "as a southern man and a slaveholder, can you undertake to say that such conduct as his — this attempt to put blacks and whites on an equality — is not dangerous to the institutions of the country?"
"Not so dangerous by half," was the prompt reply, "as the attempting to commingle and confound with the mass of the slaves the children of free fathers, inheriting from the fathers' side a spirit not very consistent with the condition of servitude. What do you think is likely to be the consequence of having among our slaves the descendants of such men, for instance, as Thomas Jefferson?"
"Thomas Jefferson! nonsense!" exclaimed the New Yorker.
"Nonsense or not, I can only say, that I once saw a very decent, bright mulatto woman, at least three quarters white, sold at auction, who claimed to be a granddaughter of that famous ex-president; and, as far as resemblance goes, her face and figure sustained her pretensions. At any rate, the woman brought an extra hundred dollars or so beyond her otherwise market value, as the purchaser facetiously observed, on account of the goodness of the breed."
The two northern passengers seemed a little shocked at this story, the force of which they attempted to evade by insisting that the woman must have been an impostor, and that perhaps this idea was got up for the very purpose of enlivening the sale.
"Well," said the other with a laugh, "that certainly is very possible. Gouge and McGrab were unquestionably shrewd fellows, and in the way of trade up to almost any thing."
My interest in the conversation was here redoubled. Gouge and McGrab! McGrab was the name of the very slave trader by whom my wife and child had been purchased and transported to Augusta, and it was as his property that my agent formerly employed in that business had obtained the last trace of them.
I hastened to inquire when and where it was that my fellow-passenger had witnessed this sale of Jefferson's alleged granddaughter.
"O, at Augusta, in Georgia, some twenty years since," was the answer. ab:
"And pray," I asked, "who is this McGrab that you speak of? I have an interest in getting some trace of a slave dealer of that name."
He readily replied that McGrab was a Scotchman by birth, but a South Carolinian by education, engaged some years ago, along with his partner Gouge, in the supply of the southern market with slaves. The headquarters of their traffic was at Augusta. McGrab scoured the more northern slave states, attending sheriffs' and executors' sales, and driving such private bargains as he could to keep up the supply, which he forwarded from time to time to his partner Gouge, who attended chiefly to the business of selling at Augusta. But the partnership had been many years dissolved, and McGrab himself a long time dead. Gouge was still living at Augusta, retired from business, and one of the wealthiest men in the place.
"I ought to know something," he added aside to me, "of these men and their business, for in my younger days I was three or four years their clerk and bookkeeper, and for a while their partner. I owe old Gouge a grudge, and if you have any claim against them, and I can any way assist you, you shall be welcome to my services."