The Press. — London, England, 1856-09-06 00:00:00

856 many. An examination into history will show us •hat the cruelty of the laws resulted from the e f fects of indulgent practice. During the first years of importation of slaves into Sont , i Carolina they enjoyed many privileges. Those who lived in intelligent families, and had any desire to learn, were instructed in reading and writing. Liberty was given them to meet in assemblies of worship, in class meetings, and otherwise, without the presence of white witnesses ; and many were raised to situations of trust and consequence. The result of this was the development of a good degree of intelligence and manliness among the slaves. There arose among them grave, thoughtful, energetic men, with their ears and eyes open, and their minds constantly awake to compare and reason. When minds come into this state, in a government professing to be founded on principles of universal equality, it follows that almost every public speech, document, or newspaper, becomes an incendiary publication. Of this fact the southern slave states have ever exhibited the most singular unconsciousness. Documents containing senti ments most dangerous for slaves to hear have been pub licly read and applauded among them. The slave has heard, amid shouts, on the fourth of July, that his masters held the truth to be sellevident, that all men were born equal, and had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that all governments derive their just power from the consent of the g'iverned. Even the mottoes of newspapers have embodied sentiments of the most insurrectionary character. Such inscriptions as " Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God," stand, to this day, in large letters, at the head of southern news papers, while speeches of senators and public men, in which the principles of universal democracy are asserted, are constant matters of discussion. An account is then given of Donmark Vesey, the father of Dred : Accordingly, we find that when the discussions for the admission of Missouri as a slave state produced a wave whose waters undulated in every part of the Union, there were found among the slaves men of unusual thought and vigour, who were no inattentive witnesses and listeners. The discussions were printed in the newspapers ; and what was printed in the newspapers was further discussed at the post-office door, in the tavern, in the bar-room, at the dinner-party, where black servants were listening be hind the chairs. A free coloured man in the city of Charlestown, named Denmark Vesey, was the one who had the hardihood to seek to use the electric fluid in the cloud thus accumulated. He conceived the hopeless pro ject of imitating the example set by the American race, and achieving independence for the blacks. Our know ledge of this man is derived entirely from the printed re ports of the magistrates who gave an account of the in s irrection of which he was the instigator, and who will not, of course, be supposed to be unduly prejudiced in his favour. They state that he was first brought to the country by one Captain Vesey, a young lad, distinguished for personal beauty and great intelligence, and that he proved for twenty years a most faithful slave ; but on drawing a prize of fifteen hundred dollars in a lottery, he purchased his freedom of his master, and worked as a car penter in the city of Charleston. He was distinguished for strength and activity; and, as the accounts state, main tained such an irreproachable character, and enjoyed so much the confidence of the whites, that when he was accused the charge was not only discredited, but he was not even arrested for several days after, and not till the proof of his guilt had become too strong to be doubted. This whole chapter, made up from authentic records, is a masterly piece of composition. The boy Dred is thus introduced : Among the children of Denmark Vesey was a boy by a Mandingo slave woman, who was his father's particular favorite. The Mandingos are one of the finest of African tribes, distinguished fur intelligence, beauty of form, and an indomitable pride and energy of nature. As slaves, they are considered as particularly valuable by those who have tact enough to govern them, because of their great capability and their proud faithfulness; but they ieseut a government of brute force, and under such are always fractious and dangerous. This boy received from his mother the name of Dred ; a name not unusual among the slaves, and generally given to those of great physical force. The development of this child's mind was so uncommon as to excite astonishment among the negroes. He early acquired the power of reading, by an apparent instinctive faculty, and would often astonish those around him with things which he had discovered in books. Like other children of a deep and fervent nature, he developed great religious ardour, and often surprised the elder negroes by his questions and replies on this subject. A son so en• dowed could not but be an object of great pride and interest to a father like Denmark Vesey. The impression seemed to prevail universally among the negroes that this child was born for extraordinary things: and perhaps it was the yearning to acquire liberty for the development of such a mind which first led Denmark Vesey to reflect on the nature of slavery, and the terrible weights which it lays on the human intellect, and to conceive the project of libera• time a race. The Bible, of which Vesey was an incessant reader, stimulated this desire. He likened his own position of comparative education, competence, and general esteem among the whites, to that of Moses among the Egyptians ; and nourished the idea that, like Moses, he was sent as a deliverer. During the process of the conspiracy, this son, though but ten years of age, was his father's confidant ; and he often charged him, though he should fail in the attempt, never to be discouraged. He impressed it upon his mind that he should never submit tamely to the yoke of slavery ; and nourished the idea already impressed, that some more than ordinary destiny was reserved for him. After the discovery of the plot, and the execution of its leaders, those more immediately connected with them were sold from the state, oven though not proved to have THE PRESS. participated. With the most guarded caution, Vesey had exempted this son from suspicion. It had been an agreed policy with them both, that in the presence of others they should counterfeit alienation and dislike. Their confiden tial meetings with each other had been stolen and secret. At the time of his father's execution, Dred was a lad of fourteen. He could not be admitted to his father's prison, but he was a witness of the undaunted aspect with which he and the other conspirators met their doom. The memory dropped into the depths of his soul as a stone drops into the desolate depths of a dark mountain lake. Sold to a distant plantation, he became noted for his des perate unsulaluable disposition. He joined in none of the social recreations and amusements of the slaves, laboured with proud and silent assiduity, but, on the sli4htest rebuke or threat, flashed up with a savage fierceness, which, sup- ported by his immense bodily strength, made him an object of dread among overseers. He was one of those of whom they gladly rid themselves; and, like a fractious horse, was sold from master to master. Finally, an over seer, hardier than the rest, determined on the task of subduing him. In the scuffle that ensued Dred struck him to the earth, a dead man, made his escape to the swamps, and was never afterwards heard of in civil- ised life. The description of the swamp which follows is perfectly magnificent : The realer who consults the map will discover that the whole eastern shore of the southern states, with slight in • terruptions, is belted by an immense chain of swamps, regions of hopeless disorder, where the abundant growth and vegetation of nature, sucking up its forces from the humid soil, seems to rejoice in a savage exuberance, and bid defiance to all human efforts either to penetrate or subdue. These wild regions are the homes of the alligator, the mocassin, and the rattle•snake. Evergreen trees, mingling freely with the deciduous children of the forest, form here dense jungles, verdant all the year round, and which afford shelter to numberless birds, with whose warbling the leafy desolat.on perpetually resounds. Climbing vines, and parasitic plants, of untold splendour, and boundless exuberance of growth, twine and interlace and hang, from the heights of the highest trees, pennons of gold and purple—triumphant banners whit i attest the solitary majesty of nature. A species of parasitic moss wreaths its abundant draperies from tree to tree, and hangs in pearly festoons, through which shine the scarlet berry and green leaves of the American holly. What the moun tains of Switzerland were to the persecuted Vaudois, this swampy belt has been to the American slave. The con stant effort to recover from thence fugitives has led to the adoption, in these states, of a separate profession, unknown at this time in any other Christian land—hunters, who train and keep dogs for the hunting of men, women, and children. And et, with all the convenience of this profes sion, the reclaiming of the fugitives from these fastnesses of nature has been a work of such expense and difficulty, that the near proximity of the swamp has always been a considerable check on the otherwise absolute power of the overseer. Modern literature contains no passage of superior eloquence to that descriptive of the only companion which Dred took with him. The clear tones of genius ring in every word of this noble passage : Dred carried with him to the swamp but one solitary companion —the bible of his father. To him it was not the messenger of peace and good will, but the herald of woe and wrath. As the mind, looking on the great volume of nature, sees there a reflection of its own internal pas• Mons, and seizes on that in it which sympathises with i.self—as the fierce and savage soul delights in the roar of torrents, the thunder of avalanches, and the whi•l of ocean storms, so is it in the great answering volume of revelation. There is something there for every phase of man's nature ; and hence its endless vitality and stimulating force. Dred had heard read in the secret meetings of the conspirators the wrathful denunciations of ancient prophets against op pression and injustice. He hud read of kingdoms con• vulsed by plagues ; of tempest, and pestilence, and locusts ; of the sea cleft in t wain, that an army of slaves might pass through, and of their pursuers whelmed in the returning waters. He had heard of prophets and deliverers, armed with supernatural powers, raised up for oppressed people ; hail pondered on the nail of Jael, the goad of Shamgar, the pitcher and lamp of Gideon ; and thrilled with fierce joy as he re id how Samson, with his two strong arms, pulled down the pillars of the festive temple, and whelmed his tr.utophant persecutors in one grave with himself. In the vast solitudes which he daily traversed these things entered deep into his soul. Cut off from all human companionship, after going weeks without seeing a human face, there was no recur rence of every-day and prosaic ideas to check the current of the enthusiasm thus kindled. Even in the soil of the cool Saxon heart the Bible has thrown out its roots with an all pervading energy, so that the whole framework of society may be said to rest on soil held together by its fibres. Even in cold and misty England armies have been made defiant and invincible by the incomparable force and deliberate valour which it breathes into men. But when this oriental seed, an exotic among us, is planted hack in the fiery soil of a tropical heart, it bursts forth sit:t an in calculable ardour of growth. A stranger cannot fail to remark the fact, that though the slaves of the South are unable to read the Bible for them- selves, yet most completely have its language and senti ment penetrated among them, giving a Hebraistic colouring to their habitual mode of expression. How much greater, then, must have been the force of the solitary perusal of this volume on so impassioned a nature I a nature, too, kindled by memories of the self-sacrificing ardour with which a father and his associates had met death at the call of freedom ; for none of us may deny that, wild and hope- less as this scheme was, it was still the same in kind with SATURDAY, the more successful one which purchased for our fathers a national existence. Can this be from the same pen that wrote of Nina's little hands pawing among her heap of love letters ? We doubt it. The second para graph of the above passage is an example of poetic fire being fused with massive thought into a splendid specimen of prose composition. At page 215, abruptly following on some clever nigger dialect, is a most eloquent description, of the refuge of Dred in the swamp:— The reader must follow us far beyond the abodes of man into the recesses of that wild desolation known as the "Dismal Swamp." We pass over vast tracts where the forest seems growing out of the water. Cypress, red cedar, sweet gum, tulip, poplar, beech, and holly, form a goodly fellowship, waving their rustling boughs above. The trees shoot up in vast columns, fifty, seventy five, and a hundred feet in height ; and below are clusters of evergreen gall bushes, with their thick and glossy foliage, mingled in with swamp honeysuckles, grape-vines, twining brier, and laurels, and other shrubs, forming an impenetrable thicket. The creeping plants sometimes climb seventy or eighty feet up the largest trees, and hang in heavy festoons from their branches. It would seem impossible that human foot could pene trate the will impervious jungle ; but we must take our readers through it to a cleared spot, where trunks of fallen trees, long decayed, have formed an island of vegetable mould, which the art ot some human hand has extended and improved. The clearing is some sixty yards long by thirty broad, and is surrounded with a natural rampart, which might well bid defiance to man or beast. Huge trees have been felled, with all their branches lying thickly one over another, in a circuit around; and Nature, seconding the efforts of the fugitives who sought refuge here, has interlaced the framework thus made with thorny cat-briars, cables of grape-vine, and thickets of Virginia creeper, which, running wild in their exuberance, climb on to the neighbouring trees, and swinging down again lose themselves in the mazes from which they sprung, so as often to form a verdurous wall fifty feet in height. In some places the laurel, with its glossy green leaves and its masses of pink-tipped snowy blossoms, presents to the eye, rank above rank, a wilderness of beauty. The pen dants of the yellow jessamine swing to and fro in the air like censers, casting forth clouds of perfume. A thousand twining vines, with flowers of untold name, perhaps un known as yet to the botanist, help to fill up the mosaic. The leafy ramparts sweep round on all the sides of the clearing, for the utmost care has been taken to make it im penetrable, and in that region of heat and moisture Nature in the course of a few weeks admirably seconds every human eff .rt. The only egress from it is by a winding path cut through with a hatchet, which can be entered by only one person at a lime ; and the water which surrounds this island entirely cuts off the trail from the scent of dogs. The following pages, descriptive of the death of an escaped negro, of the agony of his wife, and of the unexpected appearance of Dred at a camp-meeting to startle the vast assembly with fierce denunciations of wrath and vengeance, must rank among the finest exam ples of romance composition. As the book is very remarkable for its striking thought, com bining in a degree rarely found poetic ideas with penetrating perception and logical, sequence, we shall make no apology for quoting a few more passages, sufficiently beautiful in themselves to deserve preserva tion in scrap-books, and very illustrative of that masculinely intellectual character distin guishing portions of the narrative. There is great subtlety in the description of the effect produced on Dyed by his solitary life : Our readers will perhaps feel an interest to turn back with us, and follow the singular wanderings of the myste- rious personage whose wild denunciations had so disturbed the minds of the worshippers at the camp•meeting. There is a twilight ground between the boundaries of the sane and insane which the old Greeks and Romans regarded with a peculiar veneration. They held a person whose faculties were thus darkened as walking under the awful shadow of a supernatural presence ; and, as the mysterious secrets of the stars only became visible in the night, so in these eclipses of the more material faculties they held there was often an awakening of supernatural perceptions. The hot and positive light of our modern materialism, which exhales from the growth of our existence every dew- drop, which searches outand dries every rivulet of romance, which sends an unsparing beam into every cool grotto of poetic possibility, withering the moss and turning the dropping cave into a dusty den, this spirit, so remorseless, allows us no such indefinite land. There are but two words in the whole department of modern anthropology—the sane and the insane—the latter di,missed from human reckoning almost with contempt. We should find it diffi cult to give a suitable name to the strange and abnormal condition in which this singular being of whom we are speaking passed the most of his time. It was a state of exaltation and trance, which yet appeared not at all to im pede the exercise of his outward and physical faculties, but rather to give them a preternatural keenness and intensity, such as sometimes attends the more completely-developed phenomena of sonnatnhulism. The following thought, though obvious, is not commonplace In life, organised as it is at the Sonth, there are two cur rents—one the current of the master's fortunes, feelings,