The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 38
Having reached Richmond on my southern journey, I found that city also showing the general alarm. A committee of vigilance for the suppression of incendiary publications was vigorously at work; and as we drove into the town, a great bonfire was burning in the main street, consisting of publications lately seized and condemned. One of the books thus burnt at the stake was made up, I was told, entirely of extracts from speeches delivered within a few years past in the Virginia house of delegates, in which the evils of slavery had been pretty strongly depicted. But whatever liberty of that sort might previously have been allowed, nothing of the kind was to be tolerated for the future.
At Richmond I procured a horse and servant, — for in Lower Virginia there were no public conveyances, — and set off on a visit to Spring Meadow, my birthplace. To satisfy inquiries, — since any traveller, a stranger and unknown, was at that time liable to suspicion, — I gave out that, on a former visit to the country, many years before, I had become acquainted — with the family at Spring Meadow, to which, indeed, I claimed a distant relationship. As I began to approach that neighborhood, I found the aspect of desolation and desertion characteristic enough of Virginia as I remembered it, and as I now again saw it, growing more and more marked. As I rode along absorbed in thought, my eyes at length met an object which I recognized, being no other than the shop and dwelling-house of Mr Jemmy Gordon, situated at the crotch of the roads, some six or seven miles from Spring Meadow. It was a fine, warm, summer afternoon, and on a rude bench or settle beside the door was sitting, more asleep than awake, an old gentleman, who, to the best of my recollection, could be no other than Mr Jemmy himself. I accordingly addressed him as Mr Gordon, when he roused himself up, did the honors of the house with a grace, and bade me walk in and refresh myself with a glass of peach brandy. He confessed, however, that I had the. advantage of him, as he found it impossible to recollect my name. I endeavored to remind him of a young Mr Moore, an Englishman, who, so twenty years before, had passed a week or two a Spring Meadow, and more than once had ridden by his shop; and after a good deal of nodding, thinking and muttering to himself, he declared at last that he recollected me perfectly. When I inquired after Spring Meadow and its occupants, Mr Gordon shook his head mournfully. "Gone, sir, all gone to rack and ruin. Colonel Moore, in his old age, was obliged to move off somewhere to Alabama, with such of the hands as he could save from the clutch of the sheriff; and that's the last I've heard of him. The old. plantation has been abandoned these ten years; and the last time I was by there, the roof of the mansion house was all tumbling in. As I knew there was no house nearer than Gordon's, I begged of him to entertain me for a day or two, while I took a turn round the old plantation. From my conversation with him, I learnt that, with the decrease of the population in the neighborhood, his trade had fallen off, and that he, too, had serious thoughts, old as he was, of moving off to Alabama, or somewhere else at the south-west. Early the next morning, leaving my servant and horse behind me, I set off on foot. But
I was no sooner out of sight of Jemmy Gordon's house than I directed my steps, not to Spring Meadow, but to that old deserted plantation on the higher lands above, to which I had fled with Cassy, and where, in the hopefulness and thoughtlessness of youth, runaways as we were, we had passed some weeks of happy privacy, ending, indeed, in heavy tribulation. The great house had now completely fallen, and was one undistinguishable heap of ruins; but the little brick dairy, near the run below, was very much in the same condition as when we had found in it a temporary shelter. As I sat down beneath one of the great trees by which it was shaded, how all the past came rushing up before me!
After an hour or two of reverie, 1 made my way through the woods to Spring Meadow, where I found another similar scene of desolation. The garden, where I had spent so many thoughtless hours in childish sports with master James, was now overgrown with persimmons, which choked and overshadowed the few remaining shrubberies. Yet the old garden walks might be distinctly traced in several places, and there were considerable remnants of an old summer house, where we had sat hour after hour, hid away from his brother William, and studying master. James's lessons together. Adjoining the garden was the family burying-ground, and over master James's grave I dropped a tear. My mother's grave I had to seek in another part of the plantation. What stranger, lighting on the spot, could have now distinguished, from any difference in the grass and trees that waved above them, or in the wild aspect around of nature regaining her dominion, in which spot the master rested, and in which the slave? These silent graves, already half obliterated, no less than the fast-mouldering ruins of what had once been the seat of opulence and plenty, seemed plainly to testify, that not by such means were families to be perpetuated, prosperous communities to be founded, or permanent triumphs over nature secured.