Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “And this we do upon the ground that this dominion is essential to the value of slaves as property, to the security of the master and the public tranquillity, greatly dependent upon their subordination; and, in fine, as most effectually securing the general protection and comfort of the slaves themselves. Judgment below reversed; and judgment entered for the defendant.”

  During the delivery of the decision Clayton’s eyes, by accident, became fixed upon Harry, who was standing opposite to him, and who listened through the whole with breathless attention. He observed, as it went on, that Harry’s face became pale, his brow clouded, and that a fierce and peculiar expression flashed from his dark blue eye. Never had Clayton so forcibly realized the horrors of slavery as when he heard them thus so calmly defined in the presence of one into whose soul the iron had entered. The tones of Judge Clayton’s voice, so passionless, clear, and deliberate; the solemn, calm, unflinching earnestness of his words were more than a thousand passionate appeals. In the dead silence that followed Clayton rose, and requested permission of the court to be allowed to say a few words in view of the decision. His father looked slightly-surprised, and there was a little movement among the judges. But curiosity, perhaps, among other reasons, led the court to give consent. Clayton spoke: —

  “I hope it will not be considered a disrespect or impertinence for me to say that the law of slavery and the nature of that institution have for the first time been made known to me to-day in their true character. I had before flattered myself with the hope that it might be considered a guardian institution, by which a stronger race might assume the care and instruction of the weaker one; and I had hoped that its laws were capable of being so administered as to protect the defenseless. This illusion is destroyed. I see but too clearly now the purpose and object of the law. I cannot, therefore, as a Christian man, remain in the practice of law in a slave state. I therefore relinquish the profession into which I have just been inducted, and retire forever from the bar of my native state.”

  “There! — there! — there he goes!” said Frank Russel. “The sticking-point has come at last. His conscience is up, and start him now who can!”

  There was a slight motion of surprise in the court and audience. But Judge Clayton sat with unmoved serenity. The words had struck to the depth of his soul. They had struck at the root of one of his strongest hopes in life. But he had listened to them with the same calm and punctilious attention which it was his habit to give to every speaker; and with unaltered composure, he proceeded to the next business of the court.

  A step so unusual occasioned no little excitement. But Clayton was not one of the class of people to whom his associates generally felt at liberty to express their opinions of his conduct. The quiet reserve of his manners discouraged any such freedom. As usual, in cases where a person takes an uncommon course from conscientious motives, Clayton was severely criticised. The more trifling among the audience contented themselves with using the good set phrases, quixotic, absurd, ridiculous. The elder lawyers, and those friendly to Clayton, shook their heads, and said, rash, precipitate, unadvised. “There’s a want of ballast about him, somewhere!” said one. “He is unsound!” said another. “Radical and impracticable!” added a third.

  “Yes,” said Frank Russel, who had just come up, “Clayton is as radical and impracticable as the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s the most impracticable thing I know of in literature. We all can serve God and Mammon. We have discovered that happy medium in our day. Clayton is behind the times. He is Jewish in his notions. Don’t you think so, Mr. Titmarsh?” addressing the Rev. Mr. Titmarsh.

  “It strikes me that our young friend is extremely ultra,” said Mr. Titmarsh. “I might feel disposed to sympathize with him in the feelings he expressed, to some extent; but it having pleased the Divine Providence to establish the institution of slavery, I humbly presume it is not competent for human reason to judge of it.”

  “And if it had pleased the Divine Providence to have established the institution of piracy, you’d say the same thing, I suppose!” said Frank Russel.

  “Certainly, my young friend,” said Mr. Titmarsh. “Whatever is divinely ordered becomes right by that fact.”

  “I should think,” said Frank Russel, “that things were divinely ordered because they were right.”

  “No, my friend,” replied Mr. Titmarsh moderately; “they are right because they are ordered, however contrary they may appear to any of our poor notions of justice and humanity.” And Mr. Titmarsh walked off.

  “Did you hear that?” said Russel. “And they expect really to come it over us with stuff like that! Now, if a fellow don’t go to church Sundays, there’s a dreadful outcry against him for not being religious! And if they get us there, that’s the kind of thing they put down our throats! As if they were going to make practical men give in to such humbugs!”

  And the Rev. Mr. Titmarsh went off in another direction, lamenting to a friend as follows: —

  “How mournfully infidelity is increasing; among the young men of our day! They quote Scripture with the same freedom that they would a book of plays, and seem to treat it with no more reverence! I believe it’s the want of catechetical instruction while they are children. There’s been a great falling back in the teaching of the Assembly’s Catechism to children when they are young! I shall get that point up at the General Assembly. If that were thoroughly committed when they are children, I think they would never doubt afterwards.”

  Clayton went home and told his mother what he had done, and why. His father had not spoken to him on this subject; and there was that about Judge Clayton which made it difficult to introduce a topic unless he signified an inclination to enter upon it. He was, as usual, calm, grave, and considerate, attending to every duty with unwearying regularity.

  At the end of the second day, in the evening, Judge Clayton requested his son to walk in to his study. The interview was painful on both sides.

  “You are aware, my son,” he said, “that the step you have taken is a very painful one to me. I hope that it was not taken precipitately, from any sudden impulse.”

  “You may rest assured it was not,” said Clayton. “I followed the deepest and most deliberate convictions of my conscience.”

  “In that case, you could not do otherwise,” replied Judge Clayton. “I have no criticisms to make. But will your conscience allow you to retain the position of a slave-holder?”

  “I have already relinquished it,” replied Clayton, “so far as my own intentions are concerned. I retain the legal relation of owner simply as a means of protecting my servants from the cruelties of the law, and of securing the opportunity to educate and elevate them.”

  “And suppose this course brings you into conflict with the law of the state?” said Judge Clayton.

  “If there is any reasonable prospect of having the law altered, I must endeavor to do that,” said Clayton.

  “But,” said Judge Clayton, “suppose the law is so rooted in the nature of the institution that it cannot be repealed without uprooting the institution? What then?”

  “I say repeal the law if it do uproot the institution,” said Clayton. “‘Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.’”

  “I supposed that would be your answer,” said Judge Clayton patiently. “That is undoubtedly the logical line of life. But you are aware that communities do not follow such lines; your course, therefore, will place you in opposition to the community in which you live. Your conscientious convictions will cross self-interest, and the community will not allow you to carry them out.”

  “Then,” said Clayton, “I must, with myself and my servants, remove to some region where I can do this.”

  “That I supposed would be the result,” said Judge Clayton. “And have you looked at the thing in all its relations and consequences?”

  “I have,” said Clayton.

  “You are about to form a connection with Miss Gordon,” said Judge Clayton. “Have you considered how this will affect her?”

/>   “Yes,” said Clayton. “Miss Gordon fully sustains me in the course I have taken.”

  “I have no more to say,” said Judge Clayton. “Every man must act up to his sense of duty.”

  There was a pause of a few moments, and Judge Clayton added: —

  “You, perhaps, have seen the implication which your course throws upon us who still continue to practice the system and uphold the institution which you repudiate.”

  “I meant no implications,” said Clayton.

  “I presume not. But they result, logically, from your course,” said his father. “I assure you, I have often myself pondered the question with reference to my own duties. My course is a sufficient evidence that I have not come to the same result. Human law is, at best, but an approximation, a reflection of many of the ills of our nature. Imperfect as it is, it is, on the whole, a blessing. The worst system is better than anarchy.”

  “But, my father, why could you not have been a reformer of the system?”

  “My son, no reform is possible, unless we are prepared to give up the institution of slavery. That will be the immediate result; and this is so realized by the instinct of self-preservation, which is unfailing in its accuracy, that every such proposition will be ignored, till there is a settled conviction in the community that the institution itself is a moral evil, and a sincere determination felt to be free from it. I see no tendency of things in that direction. That body of religious men of different denominations, called, par excellence, the church, exhibit a degree of moral apathy on this subject which is to me very surprising. It is with them that the training of the community, on which any such reform could be built, must commence; and I see no symptoms of their undertaking it. The decisions and testimonies of the great religious assemblies in the land, in my youth, were frequent. They have grown every year less and less decided; and now the morality of the thing is openly defended in our pulpits, to my great disgust. I see no way hut that the institution will be left to work itself out to its final result, which will, in the end, be ruinous to our country. I am not myself gifted with the talents of a reformer. My turn of mind fits me for the situation I hold. I cannot hope that I have done no harm in it; but the good, I hope, will outweigh the evil. If you feel a call to enter on this course, fully understanding the difficulties and sacrifices it would probably involve, I would be the last one to throw the influence of my private wishes and feelings into the scale. We live here but a few years. It is of more consequence that we should do right than that we should enjoy ourselves.” Judge Clayton spoke this with more emotion than he usually exhibited, and Clayton was much touched.

  “My dear father,” he said, putting Nina’s note into his hand, “you made allusion to Miss Gordon. This note, which I received from her on the morning of your decision, will show you what her spirit is.”

  Judge Clayton put on his spectacles, and read over the note deliberately, twice. He then handed it formally to his son, and remarked, with his usual brevity, —

  “She will do!”

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  THE CLOUD BURSTS

  THE shadow of that awful cloud which had desolated other places now began to darken the boundaries of the plantation of Canema. No disease has ever more fully filled out the meaning of those awful words of Scripture, “The pestilence that walketh in darkness.” None has been more irregular, and apparently more perfectly capricious, in its movements. During the successive seasons that it has been epidemic in this country, it has seemed to have set at defiance the skill of the physicians. The system of medical tactics which has been wrought out by the painful experience of one season seems to be laughed to scorn by the varying type of the disease in the next. Certain sanitary laws and conditions would seem to be indispensable; yet those who are familiar with it have had fearful experience how like a wolf it will sometimes leap the boundaries of the best and most carefully guarded fold, and, spite of every caution and protection, sweep all before it.

  Its course through towns and villages has been equally singular. Sometimes descending like a cloud on a neighborhood, it will leave a single village or town untouched amidst the surrounding desolations, and long after, when health is restored to the whole neighborhood, come down suddenly on the omitted towns, as a ravaging army sends back a party for prey to some place which has been overlooked or forgotten. Sometimes, entering a house, in twenty-four hours it will take all who are in it. Sometimes it will ravage all the city except some one street or locality, and then come upon that, while all else is spared. Its course, upon southern plantations, was marked by similar capriciousness, and was made still more fatal by that peculiar nature of plantation life which withdraws the inmates so far from medical aid.

  When the first letters were received describing the progress of it in northern cities, Aunt Nesbit felt much uneasiness and alarm. It is remarkable with what tenacity people often will cling to life, whose enjoyments in it are so dull and low that a bystander would scarcely think them worth the struggle of preservation. When at length the dreaded news began to be heard from one point and another in their vicinity, Aunt Nesbit said, one day, to Nina, —

  “Your cousins, the Gordons, in E — , have written to us to leave the plantation, and come and spend some time with them till the danger is over.”

  “Why,” said Nina, “do they think the cholera can’t come there?”

  “Well,” said Aunt Nesbit, “they have their family under most excellent regulations; and living in a town so, they are within call of a doctor, if anything happens.”

  “Aunt,” said Nina, “perhaps you had better go; but I will stay with my people.”

  “Why, don’t you feel afraid, Nina?”

  “No, aunt, I don’t. Besides, I think it would be very selfish for me to live on the services of my people all my life, and then run away and leave them alone when a time of danger comes. The least I can do is to stay and take care of them.”

  This conversation was overheard by Harry, who was standing with his back to them, on the veranda, near the parlor door where they were sitting.

  “Child,” said Aunt Nesbit, “what do you suppose you can do? You haven’t any experience. Harry and Milly can do a great deal better than you can. I’ll leave Milly here. It’s our first duty to take care of our health.”

  “No, aunt, I think there are some duties before that,” said Nina. “It’s true I haven’t a great deal of strength, but I have courage; and I know my going away would discourage our people, and fill them with fear; and that, they say, predisposes to the disease. I shall get the carriage up, and go directly over to see the doctor, and get directions and medicines. I shall talk to our people, and teach them what to do, and see that it is done. And when they see that I am calm, and not afraid, they will have courage. But, aunt, if you are afraid, I think you had better go. You are feeble; you can’t make much exertion; and if you feel any safer or more comfortable, I think it would be best. I should like to have Milly stay, and she, Harry, and I, will be a board of health to the plantation.

  “Harry,” she said, “if you’ll get up the carriage, we’ll go immediately.”

  Again Harry felt the bitterness of his soul sweetened and tranquillized by the noble nature of her to whose hands the law had given the chain which bound him. Galling and intolerable as it would have been otherwise, he felt, when with her, that her service was perfect freedom. He had not said anything to Nina about the contents of the letter which he had received from his sister. He saw that it was an evil which she had no power over, and he shrank from annoying her with it. Nina supposed that his clouded and troubled aspect was caused wholly by the solicitude of responsibility.

  In the same carriage which conveyed her to the town sat Aunt Nesbit also, and her cap-boxes, whose importance even the fear of the cholera could not lessen in her eyes. Nina found the physician quite au fait on the subject.

  He had been reading about miasma and animalculæ, and he entertained Nina nearly half an hour with different theories as to the c
ause of the disease, and with the experiments which had been made in foreign hospitals.

  Among the various theories there was one which appeared to be his particular pet; and Nina couldn’t help thinking, as he stepped about so alertly, that he almost enjoyed the prospect of putting his discoveries to the test. By dint, however, of very practical and positive questions, Nina drew from him all the valuable information which he had to give her; and he wrote her a very full system of directions, and put up a case of medicines for her, assuring her that he should be happy to attend in person if he had time.

  On the way home Nina stopped at Uncle John Gordon’s plantation, and there had the first experience of the difference between written directions for a supposed case and the actual, awful realities of the disease. Her Uncle John had been seized only half an hour before, in the most awful manner. The household was all in terror and confusion, and the shrieks and groans of agony which proceeded from his room were appalling. His wife, busy with the sufferer, did not perceive that the messengers who had been sent in haste for the doctor were wringing their hands in fruitless terror, running up and down the veranda, and doing nothing.

  “Harry,” said Nina, “take out one of the carriage-horses, and ride quick for your life, and bring the doctor over here in a minute!”

  In a few moments the thing was done, and Harry was out of sight. She then walked up to the distracted servants, and commanded them, in a tone of authority, to cease their lamentations. Her resolute manner, and the quiet tone of voice which she preserved, acted as a sedative on their excited nerves. She banished all but two or three of the most reasonable from the house, and then went to the assistance of her aunt.