Raising holy hell, p.13
Raising Holy Hell, page 13
Rich, brilliant, refined, they are to a man ardent abolitionists.
And unregenerate racists.
“The African race is greatly inferior to the Caucasian in intellectual power and in the instinct for liberty,” Parker has written, “even though the African man has the largest organs of generation in the world, and the African woman the most exotic heat.”
“Destruction of slavery will remove artifical protections and allow fair play to natural laws which will eventuate in the disappearance of the colored population from the continent before the more vigorous white,” Howe has written. “Abolitionism thus becomes a sacred duty since it promotes the purification and elevation of the national blood.”
Aiming to curry their favor that he might tap their resources, the old man stages for his audience the performance of his life.
Taking deliberate care with his costume—black patent leather cravat of the sort worn by the United States Marines; caped, gray military surtout; visored fur cap; calf-high cowhide topboots; six-shooters jutting from the waistband—he expertly exploits what he knows instinctively makes them tick. He works the holy con. He pushes both their buttons:
Nostalgie de la boue—the vicarious thrill experienced by the sophisticated from romanticizing the primitive and exotic
and
Noblesse oblige—the sense of self-righteousness experienced by the privileged from acting charitably toward the underprivileged
He’s got them coming and going.
Armed with props and visual aids—a fire-chewed Bible plucked from the ashes of Brown’s Station, the blood-encrusted shackles worn by John Junior in prison, the enormous, gilt-mounted Bowie knife lifted from the Kickapoo Ranger Captain Henry Clay Pate at the Battle of Blackjack—he delivers his lines with a thespian’s aplomb:
It was just after daylight. I had less than a dozen men, the enemy over eighty. Pate and his crew were lurking in a ravine with plenty of brush for cover. I advanced on their flank and pressed to close quarter. The sun was well up and the grass was dry and I remember thinking how it would look well spattered with blood. Suddenly one of the ruffians stands up flying a white kerchief from a rifle barrel. This is where he reaches down and hoists the gleaming blade from the top of his boot. Look here. This was Pate’s.
AND
I once saw a swollen and blackened body in the middle of a road with its head and heart shot out, this after the body had lain on the ground for some eighteen hours worked at by blowflies and maggots. That body had been left to rot in the sun by the bully-boys who had made of it nothing but carrion and who had a perfect right to be hanged. This is where he pauses at some length, apparently to wipe a tear from his eye. That body belonged to my son.
AND
I am a wanted man in Kanzas and have been reliably informed of the possibility of some of Uncle Sam’s hounds being on my track even as we speak. This is where he swings a furtive glance left, then right, in advance of lowering his voice as if complice in an intimacy. They shall never take me. I will resist any process whatsoever served upon me with irons in rather than upon my hands, for I claim there is no law there, only law-breaking.
They believe—both because he leads them to believe and because they wish to believe so desperately—that he means to raise funds to mount a reconstituted defense of Kansas. He suggests the creation of a “Secret Service composed of border patrols, vigilance squadrons, mounted regulators, and home-guard companies stocked with men who fear God too much to fear anything human.” He predicts that the Pro Slave faction will attack in force come spring.
Let them inquire too long or probe too deeply, however, and he bridles. “I will not be interrogated,” he declares sharply. “I do not expose my intentions. No one knows them but myself. I serve from secret, no questions asked.
“If you wish to know what I am about, do not examine me too closely. Rather consider the work in which I am engaged. There you will discover all that need concern you. You know my history. You know of my activities in Kanzas. I am no adventurer. Support me because you support the cause that I embody. Take me as you take God. Take me on faith alone. I have no purpose but to serve the cause of liberty.”
Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, and a “Claque” spear-carrier, comments, “I have spoken with him on several occasions, but he leaves much in the dark concerning his destinations and designs for the future. Still, our best people contribute in aid of his plan even without knowledge of particulars, such confidence does he inspire.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who invites him to spend the night, later describes him as “artless goodness and sublime courage.”
Henry David Thoreau, who invites him to dinner, later describes him as “a transcendentalist saint and an angel of light.”
There is more going on here than a shared commitment to the Cause. There is the near sexual allure that the Fist-in-the-flesh possesses for the Men without Fists.
“I think him the manliest man I have ever seen,” remarks one.
In the end, they all but bulldoze one another over scrambling to assume the Missionary Position:
The Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee, chaired by Stearns, votes him custody of a dozen trunks of clothing, two hundred Sharp’s carbines, four thousand ball cartridges, thirty-one thousand percussion caps, various sabers, one brass cannon, and one thousand dollars.
The National Kansas Aid Committee, of which Howe is a member, votes him supplies for one hundred men and five thousand dollars for “defensive measures in Kansas.”
He collects on the fly well over one thousand dollars in private donations.
Stearns spends thirteen hundred dollars out of pocket to buy him two hundred Navy Colt revolvers, then pledges to deposit seven thousand dollars in his Hartford bank account.
The lot is arranged in darkest secrecy and strictest confidence.
The old man intends not a farthing of it for Kansas.
Thanking them profusely, he makes for Collinsville in Connecticut where he has it from a well-informed source that there lives a forgemaster whose work is well worth the visit.
FRIEND
Mrs. Judge Thomas Russell
When he came to Boston that first time, he stayed with the judge and me the better part of a week, almost the entire time barricaded in his room declining to receive a single visitor, the help included.
However it happened one evening that the two of us were sitting to ourselves in the parlor when suddenly he drew from a boot top a long, evil-looking knife. Well, you can imagine the start it gave me. The judge did not keep weapons, we had children in the house you understand, and, well, I wasn’t accustomed to knife play in my parlor. One means, just imagine.
Not that that was an end to it, for he directly drew from his other boot two smaller, though no less wicked-looking knives, and then from an inside coat pocket a large pistol, and then from the pocket of his weskit yet a smaller one.
Here I must say he looked at me rather doubtfully, for I believe he had yet a third concealed upon his person which he also would have removed had it not been inappropriate in my presence to resort to the indelicate measures necessary to get at it.
In any event, he proceeded then to draw each and all of the charges from the guns, after which he arose and solemnly deposited them in the palms of my hands filling them both with cartridges while I sat mouth agape, paralyzed with fear.
“Now, don’t be awkward,” he cautioned. “Keep steady, or they will all fire off. You hold in your hands there the lives of twelve men deserving of death.”
Returning to his seat, he then blew into each end of each of the gun barrels, examined meticulously each of their locks, ran a thumb along each of the knife blades, and having retrieved the munitions from me, one by one reloaded the firearms.
“You haven’t had this in your parlor before, have you?” he asked.
When I answered no, he darkened and said, “I shall never be taken alive you know, though it would be a shame and a pity to stain so fine a carpet as this.
“Now let me remind you once again that should you hear a noise in the night, be quick to put the baby under the pillow.”
Whether he seriously wished to assure himself of the condition of his defenses, or was more interested in amusing himself with the effect it had on me, I never have satisfied myself.
I believe he was a great man; and by far, by far the queerest I ever knew.
During a reception arranged for his benefit at the Exeter Street manse of Theodore Parker in Boston, the old man had found himself embroiled in a heated exchange with William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor he once had so admired.
“Where there is no life, sir,” the bespectacled Garrison had declared in response to the old man’s increasingly fervent argument espousing violent intervention with the peculiar institution, “there is no freedom!”
“But I am stunned, sir,” the old man had retorted. “Did not my master Jesus Christ come down from heaven and sacrifice Himself to free the human race? Should I, a mere worm not worthy to crawl under His feet, then refuse to sacrifice myself?
“No sir! If by going up to heaven I can effect the going down of slavery, Lord take me now!”
It had been just then that one of Parker’s liveried servitors, entirely by coincidence and wholly oblivious to the tension of the moment, had approached the two men with a gleaming platter ornamentally arrayed with canapés of the sort often referred to colloquially as pigs-in-a-blanket.
As it happened, Garrison’s favorite.
“Ah, what have we here?” the Quakerish editor had remarked, eyes widening as he helped himself to a toothpicked pair.
The old man could only shake his head and sigh. “I am sorry,” he had said, declining, “but I fear I have long since forgotten what it means to eat for pleasure.”
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
I never could get at his theology. For him there seemed to be but a single wrong, and that was slavery. On anything else he refused to express himself. There was no question that he believed in God, but his attitude seemed to be, if anything stand in the way of getting rid of slavery, one might properly break all the Decalogue to mow it down.
You might say I respected him, but did not admire him.
I liked him even less.
JOHN BROWN
William Lloyd Garrison was an old woman. History is deaf and implacable; history is made by men’s actions, not their sentiments. He thought he could jaw slavery to death. Well, by the time I met him he’d been jawing nigh a quarter of a century.
Appeared to me slavery was as full of sap as ever.
Before departing Boston he troubles himself to pay his respects on the still bedridden Charles Sumner.
“Ah, come in, Mr. Brown, come in,” says Sumner, peering at him over the half-rims of his reading glasses before motioning him on with the flop of a limp wrist.
“‘He has shown strength with his arm, He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.’” His voice, once that of a cannoneer’s, is as weak and runny as a librarian’s.
“Ah,” says the old man, standing by the foot end of the bed. “Luke. Chapter 1, verses 51 and 52. A particular favorite of mine.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” says Sumner, unhooking his spectacles from behind his ears and dabbling at his nose with a handkerchief. The cartilage there has been slow to mend; he is plagued by chronic sniffles. “So, I had been informed that you were in our fair city. You must forgive my having left you unattended until now, but I fear I am not up to that sort of thing just yet. The receptions and banquets and so forth.
“But here. I forget myself. Have a seat.”
“Not atall, Senator,” says the old man. “I won’t be staying but a moment. I intended merely to wish you a speedy recovery and be on my way.” He pauses. “You know I am no politican. For the vast lot I would not fetch a bucket were they to ignite before my eyes.”
“A helpful image,” says Sumner chuckling softly, wincing for the trouble. “Not atall unpleasant, I must say.”
“And I say this, sir. I say the Cause cannot spare you. Your voice. Your fire. Especially now. You must hasten back.”
“I will try, Mr. Brown. I will try as my best allows.”
“No sir. Do not try. Do!”
The old man is halfway out the door when something stops him and he wings back around. “Your frock, sir. The one you were wearing that day?”
So summarily does Sumner respond, it is as if he had anticipated the request from the outset. “Absolutely. Just there. In the wardrobe. Feel free.”
The coat, once a fine black bombazine, hangs from its rack browned with blood. How much blood is shocking; from collar to waist-button the coat is so stiffened with it, it appears less cloth than cardboard.
For a long moment the old man is silent. (“I felt,” he will say later, “as if I were in the presence of a holy relic.”) Then, eyes glistening, he does something so peculiar that Sumner will take each nuance of it to his grave: he steps forward, buries his face deep in the garment’s folds, and inhales with all the lust of a lover filling his lungs of a sweet-clovered morn.
The forgemaster’s name is Charlie Blair.
“They say, Mr. Blair,” says the old man, “that in these parts you are the man for a decent edge tool.”
“’Tis only my specialty,” answers the aproned Blair from behind the counter. “And it is Chas to you sir. No Mistering about the shops, if you please.”
“Ah, Chas is it? Then Chas, if I might inquire, what would you charge to make five hundred or one thousand pikes?”
“What sort of pike would that be then?”
“Say a Bowie blade or the like, eight or nine inches in length, double-edged of a tempered cast steel fastened by ferrules of a strong but malleable iron to the tip of a stout shaft or ash handle pole about six foot long, not dissimilar to the sort peculiar to the common hay fork.”
“Well sir, something along them lines—I reckon I could make you five hundred such pieces at a dollar and a quarter a piece, or one thousand pieces at a dollar a piece.”
“I believe it a fair price Chas, and would be glad to pay it for the one thousand. Shall we say five hundred dollars now and five hundred dollars on delivery?”
“Suits me,” says Blair, repairing to his backroom. “I will go now and draw up the contract.”
“Give a slave a pike,” thinks the old man to himself, “and make a slave a man.
“Give a thousand men a pike, and make those men an army.”
To Mary Day Brown
The Timbucto Mission
North Elba, New York
FROM: The Frederick Douglass House, Rochester, New York.
Dear Wife:
I am, praised be God, once more in York state, but whether I shall be able to visit you anytime soon, I cannot now say. Still, I take comfort in the feeling that I am so near.
The anxiety I feel to see you & the children once more I cannot describe. Also, I want exceedingly to see how that little company of sheep look about this time.
Unfortun’ly, the cries of my poor sorrowed & despairing brethr’n whose tears are ever in my eyes & whose sighs are ever in my ears may prevent my enjoying the happiness I so much desire.
But: courage, courage, courage! The Great Work of my life I may yet see accomplished & then be permitted, God helping, to return & rest at evening.
P.S. I shall send you some newspapers soon to let you see what different stories are told about me. None tell the truth as I know it.
Dred Scott v. Sanford
(Racism in Judicial Robes)
1857
THE CASE
Dred Scott—a slave whose Missouri owner takes him along when he moves to the free state of Illinois, then to the free territory of Wisconsin, eventually back to the slave state of Missouri—sues for his freedom on the basis of his having been for several years a resident on free soil.
THE DECISION
(Edited Transcripts)
We think they—negroes, the negro African race—are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.
On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the master race, and, whether emancipated or not, had no rights or privileges but such as those who held power might choose to grant them.
In the opinion of the court, the language used in the Declaration of Independence shows that neither slaves nor their descendants were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.
The Constitution makes no distinction between property in a slave, and other property.
The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.
It is the opinion of the court that any Act of Congress (viz. the Missouri Compromise) which prohibits a citizen from owning property of this kind in federal territory, is not warranted by the Constitution and is therefore void.
Neither Dred Scott nor any of his family was made free by being carried into that territory, even if carried there by the owner with that intention.
Negroes, being members of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either socially or politically, have no rights which white men are bound to respect.
—ROGER B. TANEY, age eighty, scion of a prosperous, slave-owning, Maryland tobacco-farming family, and—for the moment—chief justice of the United States
Taney’s decision effectively renders Negroes the only people on the face of the earth barred from ever becoming American citizens.
