Volume I Part 9 (1/2)
The prison must be tried some years longer before a complete comparison of it with others can be made; but it appears at present, that if there be some few diseases which may possibly be aggravated by the silence and thoughtfulness attendant on solitary confinement (which I do not know to be the case), there are many more which disappear under the regularity of temperature and of hours, and the good diet of the establishment.
There was certainly less sallowness and anxiety in the faces of the inmates than struck me in the other prisons. One man amazed me by calling the four years he had pa.s.sed here the most comfortable he had ever known; but when he told me the wretchedness of his previous life, I fully believed him.
I found, on visiting the elder of the brothers, how complete is the secrecy preserved in the prison. I had been repeatedly told that these brothers came in together, and, therefore, had no hesitation in mentioning the one to the other. I was thunderstruck with the vehemence with which the elder turned upon me with the question, ”Is _my_ brother in this prison?” ”I was told you came in together,” replied I. ”Then they put him in just after me,” cried he. ”What did they find him guilty of? What part of the prison is he in? What work does he do?” and a number of other questions; none of which, of course, I would answer. I was not very sorry that he was accidentally made acquainted with what he had led his young brother into. I fear he could bear it only too well.
When I told the warden the mistake I had made, I found that the younger brother came in three weeks after the elder.
The cases I became acquainted with were not all hopeful. Some of the convicts were so stupid as not to be relied upon, more or less. Others canted so detestably, and were (always in connexion with their cant) so certain that they should never sin more, that I have every expectation that they will find themselves in prison again some day. One fellow, a sailor, notorious for having taken more lives than probably any man in the United States, was quite confident that he should be perfectly virtuous henceforth. He should never touch anything stronger than tea, or lift his hand against money or life. I told him I thought he could not be sure of all this till he was within sight of money and the smell of strong liquors; and that he was more confident than I should like to be. He shook his shock of red hair at me, and glared with his one ferocious eye, as he said he knew all about it, as he had been the worst of men, and Christ had had mercy on his poor soul. When I had got him away from his cant, and upon subjects on which he could talk with some simplicity, I found that even this man preferred this prison to others that he had been in. It so happened that no conviction for murder had ever been procurable against him; his imprisonments were all for theft.
His account of the old Walnut-street prison was dreadful. He there daily heard stories of crimes, from four in the winter afternoons till daylight. ”Poor boasting! for the crimes they bragged of were never done.” I asked him how he got into that prison. ”For a couple o'
larcenies, a grand and a little,” said he, with the most business-like nonchalance. He was waylaid by two old burglars on his coming out, and on the spot agreed upon an enterprise for the next night. His mother died in his arms; he went and committed the burglary, was caught, and before midnight was in prison again. His accounts of his deeds were too scientific for my understanding; but I made out enough to be ready when he asked my advice what to do when he came out. I answered as if he were in earnest, advising him to leave Philadelphia and all towns, and settle in the woods, out of the way of grogshops, bad company, and other people's property. But his keepers expect that he will end his days with them, and this is the hope of that part of society which fears his ferocity.
As the system of solitary imprisonment gains ground, I trust that the practice of prison-visiting will gain ground too. It is most desirable that it should not be left wholly in the hands of proselyting religionists, but be shared by those who better understand human nature and command a greater variety of influences. For the sake of religion itself this is desirable, to rescue it from becoming a mere prison solace; an excitement seized when no other can be had, and to be laid aside when old pursuits offer themselves for resumption. Kind-hearted persons will have an opportunity of doing extensive and unquestionable good by keeping up the social affections of the prisoners, giving them new ideas, making them cheerful, and investing with pleasant a.s.sociations whatever things are honest, pure, lovely, and of good report.
In other prisons much might thus be done, though not, I think, with such extraordinary effect as under the system of solitary confinement. I was struck with something I saw at the Charlestown prison (Ma.s.sachusetts).
Several convicts, black and white, who had behaved well, were practising singing, which is allowed as an indulgence. It seemed strange to hear ”The heavens are telling” from such lips; but I listened to it with more pleasure than in some far finer places. Any kind person who can introduce a new innocent pursuit into a prison as a solace to its inmates cannot fail to be doing an important good.
This reminds me that a service may be rendered, not so much to the convicts as to society, by any persons who can supply the prisons where stonecutting is going on with a good set of epitaphs. At Auburn they are wanted, and much more at Nashville (Tennessee), where the stonecutting department is superintended by an honest Englishman, whose stock of epitaphs is small and of miserable quality. We half undertook to prepare and collect some for him, but found it a less easy task than we had supposed. We got out our pencils at three o'clock one summer morning, when our stage had broken down on a bad Tennessee road; but one of our party observing that this was the first time he had ever heard of making epitaphs for amus.e.m.e.nt, there was an end of the attempt; and the Nashville prison remains unsupplied, unless somebody else has done better than we.
I suspect the fault lies in the supposition that epitaphs of general application cannot be made at all. An epitaph should be the breathing of emotion arising out of a particular case; and none made for stonecutters' use can have much life or truth. Still, they may have grammar and general propriety, so as to be an advantageous subst.i.tute for some at present in use, if only persons can be found to compose them on such considerations.
I saw at the Charlestown prison a sight more impressive to me than all else that the walls contained; a man of might, but whose power has taken a wrong direction; his hand being against every man, and every man's against him. He is a prison-breaker so formidable as to be regarded and treated as if he were of Satanic race, and not as made up of flesh and blood, and emotions that may be roused, and affections subject to the touch. He seems, indeed, to have become somewhat of the Satanic kind, for he is now piqued to do all the harm he can. His pride is in for it; his reputation stands upon it. I was shown an enormous block of stone which he had displaced by the aid of a ”gentleman” outside, who, for fear of the prison-breaker's blabbing, committed suicide on his recapture. The strong man was heavily fettered, confined in a different cell every night, and conducted to it by a procession of turnkeys. As we stood aside in the echoing pa.s.sage to let the array go by, there was something really grand in the air of the man who had virtually said to himself, ”Evil, be thou my good!” He stepped slowly, clanking his chains, and looking us full in the face as he pa.s.sed. He cannot but have a calm sense of power when he nightly sees the irons, the bars and locks, and the six fellow-men, all in requisition to keep him from working his will. As we saw him slowly turn into his cell, and heard lock after lock shot behind him, I could not help thinking that there was much true monarchical feeling within those four narrow walls.
FIRST SIGHT OF SLAVERY.
”Ed io, ch'avea di riguardar desio La condicion, che tal fortezza serra, Com' i fu dentro, l'occhio intorno invio, E veggio ad ogni man grande campagna Piena ad duolo, e di tormento rio.”
DANTE.
From the day of my entering the States till that of my leaving Philadelphia I had seen society basking in one bright suns.h.i.+ne of good-will. The sweet temper and kindly manners of the Americans are so striking to foreigners, that it is some time before the dazzled stranger perceives that, genuine as is all this good, evils as black as night exist along with it. I had been received with such hearty hospitality everywhere, and had lived among friends so conscientious in their regard for human rights, that, though I had heard of abolition riots, and had observed somewhat of the degradation of the blacks, my mind had not yet been really troubled about the enmity of the races. The time of awakening must come. It began just before I left Philadelphia.
I was calling on a lady whom I had heard speak with strong horror of the abolitionists (with whom I had then no acquaintance), and she turned round upon me with the question whether I would not prevent, if I could, the marriage of a white person with a person of colour. I saw at once the beginning of endless troubles in this inquiry, and was very sorry it had been made; but my determination had been adopted long before, never to evade the great question of colour; never to provoke it; but always to meet it plainly in whatever form it should be presented. I replied that I would never, under any circ.u.mstances, try to separate persons who really loved, believing such to be truly those whom G.o.d had joined; but I observed that the case she put was one not likely to happen, as I believed the blacks were no more disposed to marry the whites than the whites to marry the blacks. ”You are an amalgamationist!” cried she. I told her that the party term was new to me; but that she must give what name she pleased to the principle I had declared in answer to her question. This lady is an eminent religionist, and denunciations spread rapidly from her. The day before I left Philadelphia my old s.h.i.+pmate, the Prussian physician, arrived there, and lost no time in calling to tell me, with much agitation, that I must not go a step farther south; that he had heard on all hands, within two hours of his arrival, that I was an amalgamationist, and that my having published a story against slavery would be fatal to me in the slave states. I did not give much credit to the latter part of this news, and saw plainly that all I had to do was to go straight on. I really desired to see the working of the slave system, and was glad that my having published against its principles divested me altogether of the character of a spy, and gave me an unquestioned liberty to publish the results of what I might observe.
In order to see things as they were, it was necessary that people's minds should not be prepossessed by my friends as to my opinions and conduct; and I therefore forbade my Philadelphia friends to publish in the newspapers, as they wished, an antidote to the charges already current against me.
The next day I first set foot in a slave state, arriving in the evening at Baltimore. I dreaded inexpressibly the first sight of a slave, and could not help speculating on the lot of every person of colour I saw from the windows the first few days. The servants in the house where I was were free blacks.
Before a week was over I perceived that all that is said in England of the hatred of the whites to the blacks in America is short of the truth.
The slanders that I heard of the free blacks were too gross to injure my estimation of any but those who spoke them. In Baltimore the bodies of coloured people exclusively are taken for dissection, ”because the whites do not like it, and the coloured people cannot resist.” It is wonderful that the bodily structure can be (with the exception of the colouring of the skin) thus a.s.sumed to be the pattern of that of the whites; that the exquisite nervous system, the instrument of moral as well as physicial pleasures and pains, can be nicely investigated, on the ground of its being a.n.a.logous with that of the whites; that not only the mechanism, but the sensibilities of the degraded race should be argued from to those of the exalted order, and that men come from such a study with contempt for these brethren in their countenances, hatred in their hearts, and insult on their tongues. These students are the men who cannot say that the coloured people have not nerves that quiver under moral injury, nor a brain that is on fire with insult, nor pulses that throb under oppression. These are the men who should stay the hand of the rash and ignorant possessors of power, who crush the being of creatures, like themselves, ”fearfully and wonderfully made.” But to speak the right word, to hold out the helping hand, these searchers into man have not light nor strength.
It was in Baltimore that I heard Miss Edgeworth denounced as a woman of no intelligence or delicacy, whose works could never be cared for again, because, in Belinda, poor Juba was married, at length, to an English farmer's daughter! The incident is so subordinate that I had entirely forgotten it; but a clergyman's lady threw the volume to the opposite corner of the floor when she came to the page. As I have said elsewhere, Miss Edgeworth is wors.h.i.+pped throughout the United States; but it is in spite of this terrible pa.s.sage, this clause of a sentence in Belinda, which n.o.body in America can tolerate, while no one elsewhere ever, I should think, dreamed of finding fault with it.
A lady from New-England, staying in Baltimore, was one day talking over slavery with me, her detestation of it being great, when I told her I dreaded seeing a slave. ”You have seen one,” said she. ”You were waited on by a slave yesterday evening.” She told me of a gentleman who let out and lent out his slaves to wait at gentlemen's houses, and that the tall handsome mulatto who handed the tea at a party the evening before was one of these. I was glad it was over for once; but I never lost the painful feeling caused to a stranger by intercourse with slaves. No familiarity with them, no mirth and contentment on their part, ever soothed the miserable restlessness caused by the presence of a deeply-injured fellow-being. No wonder or ridicule on the spot avails anything to the stranger. He suffers, and must suffer from this, deeply and long, as surely as he is human and hates oppression.
The next slave that I saw, knowing that it was a slave, was at Was.h.i.+ngton, where a little negro child took hold of my gown in the pa.s.sage of our boarding-house, and entered our drawing-room with me. She shut the door softly, as asking leave to stay. I took up a newspaper.
She sat at my feet, and began amusing herself with my shoestrings.
Finding herself not discouraged, she presently begged play by peeping at me above and on each side the newspaper. She was a brighteyed, merry-hearted child; confiding, like other children, and dreading no evil, but doomed, hopelessly doomed, to ignorance, privation, and moral degradation. When I looked at her, and thought of the fearful disobedience to the first of moral laws, the cowardly treachery, the cruel abuse of power involved in thus dooming to blight a being so helpless, so confiding, and so full of promise, a horror came over me which sickened my very soul. To see slaves is not to be reconciled to slavery.
At Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton again I was warned, in various stealthy ways, of perils awaiting me in the South. I had no means of ascertaining the justness of these warnings but by going on, and turning back for such vague reasons was not to be thought of. So I determined to say no word to my companions (who were in no danger), but to see the truth for myself. The threats proved idle, as I suspected they would. Throughout the South I met with very candid and kind treatment. I mention these warnings partly because they are a fact connected with the state of the country, and partly because it will afterward appear that the stranger's real danger lies in the North and West, over which the South had, in my case, greatly the advantage in liberality.