Book: Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854)

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Oh, beats there, Heaven, beneath thy gorgeous blue,
One heart so basely to itself untrue,
So dead of pulse, and so insensate grown,
It feels not such a cause dear as its own?
Dwells there a being 'neath thine eye, oh, God!
A fellow-worm from out the self-same clod,
Whose fevered blood does not impatient boil,
Fierce as a tiger's in the hunter's toil,
To see degenerate men and States prolong,
So foul a deed--so thrice accursed a wrong?
Tell me, ye loud-voiced winds that ceaseless roll,
Eternal miracles from pole to pole,
Breathes there on earth so vile and mean a thing
That crushed, it will not turn again and sting?
And say! ye tyrants in your boasted halls,
Read ye no warnings on your darkened walls?
Hear ye no seeming mutterings of the cloud
Break from the millions which your steps have bowed?
Think ye, ye hold in your ignoble thrall,
Mind, soul, thought, taste, hope, feeling, valor, all?
No; these unfettered scorn your nerveless hand,
Sport at their will, and scoff at your command,
Range through arcades of shadow-brooding palms,
Snuff their free airs and breathe their floating balms,
Or bolder still, on fancy's fiery wing--[22]
Caught from their letters at the noon-day spring--
With star-eyed science, and her seraph train
Read the bright secrets of yon azure plain;
Hear Loxian murmurs in Rhodolphe's caves[23]
Meet with sweet answers from the nymph-voiced waves;
Sit with the pilot at Phoenicia's helm,
And mark the boundries of the Lybian realm;
See swarthy Memnon in the grave debate,
Dispute with gods, and rule a conqu'ring state,
And warmly and kindling dare--yes, _dare_ to hope,
A second Empire on the future's scope!

And thou, my country, latest born of time!
Dearest of all, of all the most sublime!
How long shall patriots own, with blush of shame,
So foul a blot upon so fair a name?
How long thy sons with filial hearts deplore,
A Python evil on thy Cyprean shore?
What! and wilt thou, the moral Hercules
Whose youth eclipsed the dream of Pericles,
Whose trunceant bands heroically caught,
The Spartan phalanx with the Attic thought,
The wizard throne of age-nursed error hurled,
Defied a tyrant and transfixed a world!
Wilt _thou_ see Afric like old Priam sue,
The bones of children as in nature due,
And foully craven, ingrate-like forget,
Thy life, thy learning's her dishonored debt?
Say; wilt not _thou_, whose time-ennobling sons--
Thy Jay's, thy Franklin's and thy Washington's,
Caught the bright cestus from fair freedom's God,
And bound it as a girdle to thy sod;
Ah! wilt not thou with generous mind confess
The might of woe, the strength of helplessness?
High-Heaven's almoner to a world oppressed,
Who in the march of nations led the rest![24]
Will there no Gracchus in _thy_ Senate stand
And speak the words that millions should command?
No Clysthementhe 'neath thy broad arched dome,
Predict the fortunes with the crimes of Rome?
Shall time yet partial in his cycling course,
Bring thee no Fox, no Pitt, no Wilberforce?
Still must thou live and corybantic die,
A traceless meteor in a clouding sky;
Thy name a cheat; thyself, a world-wide lie?
No; there will come, prophetic hearts may trust,
Some embryo angel of superior dust,
With brow of cloud and tongue of livid flame--
Another Moses, but in time and name--
Whose Heaven-appealing voice shall bid thee pass--
On either hand a wall of living glass;--
Ope for the Lybian with convulsive shock
His more than Horeb's adamantine rock,
And gazing from some second Pisgah, see
Thy idol broken and thy people free.

[Illustration: (signature) William D. Snow]

RICHMOND, Dec. 1st, 1853.


FOOTNOTES:

[7] "Ye Christian _Bondous_ who of feeling boast!"

Unable in the whole range of my vernacular, to find an epithet
sufficiently expressive to enunciate the aggravated contempt which all
feel for that pseudonymous class of philanthropists, who flauntingly
parade a pompous sympathy with popular and distant distresses, but
studiously cultivate a coarse ignorance of, and hauteur to, the
Greeks, which "are at the door," I have had recource to the Metonymy,
_Bondou_, as rendered mournfully significant through the melancholy
fate of the illustrious Houghton.--Vide _Report African Discovery
Society_.

[8] "Contemn a Marius' or a Scylla's ire."

Napoleon in his protest to Lord Bathurst, provoked by the petty
tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe, said of the "Proscriptions," and (by
negative inference) in extenuation of them, that they "_were made with
the blood yet fresh upon the sword_." A sentence, which, falling from
the lips of one of the most imperturbably cool and calculating of
mankind, under circumstances superinducing peculiar reflection on
every word uttered, cannot but come with the force of a whole volume
of excoriative evidence against the demoralization of war, even upon
the most abstracted and elevated natures.--Vide _Letters of Montholon
and Las Cases_.

[9] "Weep o'er an Agis' or Jugurtha's fate."

Agis, King of Lacedemon and colleague of Leonidas, was a youth of
singular purity and promise. Aiming to correct the abuses which had
crept into the Spartan polity, he introduced regenerative laws. Among
others, one for the equalization of property, and as an example of
disinterested liberality, shared his estate with the community.
Unappreciated by the degenerated Senate however, he was deposed, and,
with his whole family, strangled by order of the ingrate
State.--_Edin. Encyc._

It is said that when Jugurtha was led before the ear of the conquerer,
he lost his senses. After the triumph he was thrown into prison,
where, whilst they were in haste to strip him, some tore his robes off
his back, and others, catching eagerly at his pendants, pulled off the
tips of his ears with them. When he was thrust down naked into the
dungeon, all wild and confused, he said, with a frantic smile,
"Heavens! how cold is this bath of yours!" There struggling for six
days with starvation, and to the last hour laboring for the
preservation of his life, he came to his end.--_Plut. Cai. Mar._

[10] "Breathes the warm odor which the _girgir_ bears,"

The girgir, or the _geshe el aube_, a species of flowering grass.
Piercing, fragrant, and grateful in its odor, it operates not unlike a
mild stimulant, when respired for any length of time, and is found
chiefly near the borders of small streams and in the vicinage of the
Tassada.--_Lyn. Gui. and Soud._

[11] "Where browse the _fecho_ and the dun-gazelle."

Among the wild animals are prodigious numbers of the vari-colored
species of the gazelle, the bohur sassa, fecho, and madoqua. They are
extremely numerous in the provinces depopulated _by war and slavery_,
enjoying the wild oats of the deserted hamlets without fear of
molestation from a returning population.--_Notes on Central Africa._

[12] "And wiser than Athenas' wisest schools,
Nor led by zealots, nor scholastic rules,
Gazed at the stars which stud yon tender blue,
And hoped and deemed the cheat of death untrue."

Though Socrates and Plato, particularly the former, are generally
admitted by writers of authority, among whom, indeed, are Polycarpe,
Chrysotom, and Eusebius, to have in a manner _suspected_ rather than
believed, the immortality of the soul; yet we have no evidence of
their ever having, by the finest process of ratiocination, so
thoroughly convinced themselves as to introduce it generally as a
tenable thesis on the portico. A beautiful thread of implicit belief
and fervent hope, of after life, assimilating to the hunting-ground of
our own American Indians, and though sensuous still, a step far in
advance of the black void of ancient philosophy, has always run
through the higher mythologies of the Negro. So notorious, indeed, was
the fact among early Christians, that that ubiquitous riddle, "Prestor
John," was, by believers, regarded as having a _locale_ in Central
Africa; while Henry of Portugal actually despatched two ambassadors,
Corvilla and Payvan, to a rumored Christian court, south of the
Sahara.--_Edin. Encyc. Early Chris. His. Port._

[13] "Yet supple sophist to a plastic mind,
Sees gods in woods, and spirits in the wind."

The imagination of the African, like his musical genius, which
extracts surprising harmony from the rudest of sources, the clapping
of hands, the clanking of chains, the resonance of lasso wood, and
perforated shells, seems to invest everything with a resident spirit
of peculiar power. Accordingly, his mythologies are most numerous and
poetical--his entire catalogue of superior gods alone, embracing a
more extended length than the Assyro-Babylon Alphabet, with its three
hundred letters.

[14] "The vengeful causes and the deed forgot."

All travellers agree in the facile ductility and inertia-like
amiability of the native African character.--BREWSTER _on Africa._

[15] "The merry numbers of his crisp-haired crew."

The negro race is, perhaps, the most prolific of all the human
species. Their infancy and youth are singularly happy. The parents are
passionately fond of their children.--GOLDBURY'S _Travels._

"Strike me," said my attendant, "but do not curse my mother." The same
sentiment I found universally to prevail.

Some of the first lessons in which the Mandings women instruct their
children is the _practice of truth_. It was the only consolation for a
negro mother, whose son had been murdered by the Moors, that "_the boy
had never told a lie_."--PARK'S _Travels._

[16] "With all the father sees each form retire,
A ruthless heathen, but a loving sire."

"Or led the combat, bold without a plan,
An artless savage, but a fearless man."
CAMPBELL.

[17] "Till lured by wealth the hardy Portuguese,
Sought the green waters of his Eastern seas,
And venturous nations more excursive grown,
Pierced his glad coast from radiant zone to zone."

Vasquez de Gama, a Portuguese nobleman, was the first to discover a
maritime passage to the Indies; unless, perhaps, we credit the
improbable achievement of the Phoenicians, related by Herodotus as
occurring, 604 B.C.

De Gama doubled the cape in 1498, explored the eastern shores as far
as Melinda, in Zanguebar, and sailing thence arrived at Calcutta in
May. This expedition, second to none in its results, save that of
Columbus six years before, drew the attention of all Europe. Whole
nations became actuated by the same enthusiasm, and private companies
of merchants sent out whole fleets on voyages of discovery, scouring
the entire coast from Cape Verd to Gaudfui, and discovering the
Mascharenhas and most of the islands of the Ethiopean Archipelago.

[18] "Cheats his own nature and now generous grown,
Dispenses realms and empires not his own."

Charles V. granted a patent _to one of his Flemish favorites_,
containing an exclusive right to import four thousand negroes!--_Hist.
Slavery_.

The crime of having _first_ recommended the importation of African
slaves into America, _is due to the Flemish nobility_, who obtained a
monopoly of four thousand negroes, which they sold to some Genoese
merchants for 25,000 ducats.--_Life of Cardinal Ximenes_.

They (the Genoese) were the first to bring into a regular form, that
commerce for slaves, between Africa and America, which has since grown
to such an amazing extent.--_Robertson._

[19] "Too warmly generous and dearly true,
The simple black," &c.

It will remain an indelible reproach on the name of Europeans, that
for more than three centuries their intercourse with the Africans has
only tended to destroy their happiness and debase their
character.--_Edin. Ency._

[20] "Now laughs the stranger at their anguished throes."

The arts of the slave-merchant have inflamed the hostility of their
various tribes, and heightened their ferocity by sedulously increasing
their wars.--_Ibid._

[21] "By specious creeds and sophists darkly taught."

Hamlet's advice to his offending mother;--

"Assume a virtue, tho' you have it not."

Adding hypocrisy to avowed unworthiness, was the acknowledged
injunction of the church, wherever and whenever she participated in
secular affairs, with a view of emolument. For a peculiar illustration
of this favorite doctrine, see Clement VI.'s edict, when, in virtue of
the right arrogated by the holy see _to dispose of all countries
belonging to the heathen_, he erected (1344) the Canaries into a
kingdom, and disposed of them to Lewis de la Corda, a prince of
Castile.

[22] "Or bolder still on fancy's fiery wing."

That I do not exaggerate the _belle lettres_ and classical
accomplishments of at least two of the "chattels" of the "peculiar
institution," in the lines following the above, see "Poems written by
Rosa and Maria," _property_ of South Carolina, and published in 1834.

[23] "Hear _Loxian_ murmurs in Rhodolphe's caves."

Loxian is a name frequently given to Apollo by Greek writers and is
met with, more than once, in the "Choephorae of Eschylus."--_Campbell._

Euripides mentions it three times, and Sophocles twice, its euphony
recommends it more than any other name of the fair-haired god.

[24] "And in the march of nations led the _van_."
_Campbell_


[Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher. (Engraved by J. C. Buttre)]




Letter


BROOKLYN, December 6th, 1853.

Dear Sir,--

Your note of November 29th, requesting a line from me for the
Autographs for Freedom, is received.

I wish that I had something that would add to the literary value of
your laudable enterprise. In so great a cause as that of human
liberty, every great interest in society ought to have a voice and a
decisive testimony. Art should be in sympathy with freedom and
literature, and all human learning should speak with _unmistakable_
accents for the elevation, evangelization, and liberation of the
oppressed. In a future day, the historian cannot purge our political
history from the shame of wanton and mercenary oppression. But there
is not, I believe, a book in the literature of our country that will
be alive and known a hundred years hence, in which can be found the
taint of despotism. The literature of the world is on the side of
liberty.

I am very truly yours,

[Illustration: (signature) Henry Ward Beecher]


[Illustration: H. B. Stowe (Engraved by J. C. Buttre)]


[Illustration: PLAYFORD HALL, SUFFOLK. The seat of Thomas Clarkson,
Esq.]




A Day spent at Playford Hall.


It was a pleasant morning in May,--I believe that is the orthodox way
of beginning a story,--when C. and I took the cars to go into the
country to Playford Hall. "And what's Playford Hall?" you say. "And
why did you go to see it?" As to what it is, here is a reasonably good
picture before you. As to why, it was for many years the residence of
Thomas Clarkson, and is now the residence of his venerable widow and
her family.

Playford Hall is considered, I think, the oldest of the fortified
houses in England, and is, I am told, the only one that has water in
the moat. The water which is seen girdling the wall in the picture, is
the moat; it surrounds the place entirely, leaving no access except
across the bridge, which is here represented.

After crossing this bridge, you come into a green court-yard, filled
with choice plants and flowering shrubs, and carpeted with that thick,
soft, velvet-like grass, which is to be found nowhere else in so
perfect a state as in England.

The water is fed by a perpetual spring, whose current is so sluggish
as scarcely to be perceptible, but which yet has the vitality of a
running stream.

It has a dark and glassy stillness of surface, only broken by the
forms of the water plants, whose leaves float thickly over it.

The walls of the moat are green with ancient moss, and from the
crevices springs an abundant flowering vine, whose delicate leaves and
bright yellow flowers in some places entirely mantled the stones with
their graceful drapery.

The picture I have given you represents only one side of the moat. The
other side is grown up with dark and thick shrubbery and ancient
trees, rising and embowering the whole place, adding to the retired
and singular effect of the whole. The place is a specimen of a sort of
thing which does not exist in America. It is one of those significant
landmarks which unite the present with the past, for which we must
return to the country of our origin.

Playford Hall is a thing peculiarly English, and Thomas Clarkson, for
whose sake I visited it, was as peculiarly an Englishman,--a specimen
of the very best kind of English mind and character, as this is of
characteristic English architecture.

We Anglo-Saxons have won a hard name in the world. There are
undoubtedly bad things which are true about us.

Taking our developments as a race, both in England and America, we may
be justly called the Romans of the nineteenth century. We have been
the race which has conquered, subdued, and broken in pieces, other
weaker races, with little regard either to justice or mercy. With
regard to benefits by us imparted to conquered nations, I think a
better story, on the whole, can be made out for the Romans than for
us. Witness the treatment of the Chinese, of the tribes of India, and
of our own American Indians.

But still there is an Anglo-Saxon blood, a vigorous sense of justice,
as appears in our Habeas Corpus, our jury trials, and other features
of State organization, and, when this is tempered in individuals, with
the elements of gentleness and compassion, and enforced by that
energy and indomitable perseverance which are characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon mind, they form a style of philanthropists peculiarly
efficient. In short, the Anglo-Saxon is efficient, in whatever he sets
himself about, whether in crushing the weak, or lifting them up.

Thomas Clarkson was born in a day when good, pious people, imported
cargoes of slaves from Africa, as one of the regular Christianized
modes of gaining a subsistence, and providing for them and their
households. It was a thing that everybody was doing, and everybody
thought they had a right to do. It was supposed that all the coffee,
tea, and sugar in the world were dependent on stealing men, women, and
children, and could be got no other way; and as to consume coffee,
sugar, rice, and rum, were evidently the chief ends of human
existence, it followed that men, women, and children, must be stolen
to the end of time.

Some good people, when they now and then heard an appalling story of
the cruelties practiced in the slave ship, declared that it was really
too bad, sympathetically remarked, "What a sorrowful world we live
in," stirred their sugar into their tea, and went on as before,
because, what was there to do--hadn't everybody always done it, and if
they didn't do it, wouldn't somebody else?

It is true that for many years individuals, at different times,
remonstrated, had written treatises, poems, stories, and movements had
been made by some religious ladies, particularly the Quakers, but the
opposition had amounted to nothing practically efficient.

The attention of Clarkson was first turned to the subject by having it
given out as the theme for a prize composition in his college class,
he being at that time a sprightly young man, about twenty-four years
of age. He entered into the investigation with no other purpose than
to see what he could make of it as a college theme.

He says of himself: "I had expected pleasure from the invention of
arguments, from the arrangement of them, from the putting of them
together, and from the thought, in the interim, that I was engaged in
an innocent contest for literary honor, but all my pleasures were
damped by the facts, which were now continually before me.

"It was but one gloomy subject from morning till night; in the day
time I was uneasy, in the night I had little rest, I sometimes never
closed my eyelids for grief."

It became not now so much a trial for academical reputation as to
write a work which should be useful to Africa. It is not surprising
that a work, written under the force of such feelings, should have
gained the prize, as it did. Clarkson was summoned from London to
Cambridge, to deliver his prize essay publicly. He says of himself, on
returning back to London: "The subject of it almost wholly engrossed
my thoughts. I became at times very seriously affected while on the
road. I stopped my horse occasionally, dismounted, and walked.

"I frequently tried to persuade myself that the contents of my essay
could not be true, but the more I reflected on the authorities on
which they were founded, the more I gave them credit. Coming in sight
of Wade's Mill, in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf
by the roadside, and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind,
that if the contents of the essay were true, it was time that somebody
should see these calamities to an end."

These reflections, as it appears, were put off for awhile, but
returned again.

This young and noble heart was of a kind that could not comfort itself
so easily for a brother's sorrow as many do.

He says of himself: "In the course of the autumn of the same year, I
walked frequently into the woods that I might think of the subject in
solitude, and find relief to my mind there; but there the question
still recurred, 'are these things true?' Still the answer followed as
instantaneously, 'they are;' still the result accompanied it,--surely
some person should interfere. I began to envy those who had seats in
Parliament, riches, and widely-extended connections, which would
enable them to take up this cause.

"Finding scarcely any one, at the time, who thought of it, I was
turned frequently to myself, but here many difficulties arose. It
struck me, among others, that a young man only twenty-four years of
age could not have that solid judgment, or that knowledge of men,
manners, and things, which were requisite to qualify him to undertake
a task of such magnitude and importance; and with whom was I to unite?
I believed, also, that it looked so much like one of the feigned
labors of Hercules, that my understanding would be suspected, if I
proposed it."

He however resolved to do something for the cause by translating his
essay from Latin into English, enlarging and presenting it to the
public. Immediately on the publication of this essay, he discovered to
his astonishment and delight, that he was not the only one who had
been interested in this subject.

Being invited to the house of William Dillwyn, one of these friends to
the cause, he says: "How surprised was I to learn, in the course of
our conversation, of the labors of Granville Sharp, of the writings of
Ramsey, and of the controversy in which the latter was engaged, of all
which I had hitherto known nothing. How surprised was I to learn that
William Dillwyn had, himself, two years before, associated himself
with five others for the purpose of enlightening the public mind on
this great subject.

"How astonished was I to find, that a society had been formed in
America for the same object. These thoughts almost overpowered me. My
mind was overwhelmed by the thought, that I had been providentially
directed to this house; the finger of Providence was beginning to be
discernible, and that the day-star of African liberty was rising."

After this he associated with many friends of the cause, and at last
it became evident that in order to effect anything, he must sacrifice
all other prospects in life, and devote himself exclusively to this
work.

He says, after mentioning reasons which prevented all his associates
from doing this: "I could look, therefore, to no person but myself;
and the question was, whether I was prepared to make the sacrifice. In
favor of the undertaking, I urged to myself that never was any cause,
which had been taken up by man, in any country or in any age, so great
and important; that never was there one in which so much misery was
heard to cry for redress; that never was there one in which so much
good could be done; never one in which the duty of Christian charity
could be so extensively exercised; never one more worthy of the
devotion of a whole life towards it; and that, if a man thought
properly, he ought to rejoice to have been called into existence, if
he were only permitted to become an instrument in forwarding it in any
part of its progress.

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