The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 42
Returning the next day to Carleton Hall, we found, sitting in the porch, a gentleman whom, from his dress and manner, I at once perceived to belong to the clerical profession. My host, who met him with great cordiality, introduced him to me as the Reverend Paul Telfair, rector of the Episcopal church of St Stephen's.
There was something in Mr Telfair's presence which strongly impressed me, the moment I set my eyes upon him. He was a slight but rather tall young man, not, I should judge, above three or four and twenty. His pale but handsome features lightened up, when he spoke, with a radiant smile, which seemed to spread round him a serene halo. His address was perfectly simple and unpretending, and yet it had in it at once such dignity and winning sweetness as to put one in mind of a real minister of grace and messenger from heaven.
"This," said Mr Mason, "is the son of that Miss Montgomery, now Mrs Telfair, whose mother was once the owner of Poplar Grove, and at not finding whom still resident upon it you seemed so much disappointed. I never saw that lady," he continued; "but knowing the son as I do, I am not surprised that you should so much have missed the presence of the mother."
It appeared, in the course of our subsequent conversation, that the Montgomerys, having removed, after the loss of their property, to Charleston, had endeavored to support themselves, though much to the scandal of some of their relations, by setting up a female school. It was not long, however, before Miss Montgomery attracted the admiration of a wealthy gentleman of that city, a Mr Telfair, whose wife she became, and by whom she had an only son — the young clergyman who had so favorably impressed me, and in whose face, striking as it was, there had yet appeared something familiar, which I now traced back to my recollection of the mother.
"Besides," added Mr Mason, "since you take so much interest in my system of plantation arrangements, let me tell you that Mr. Telfair is a main spoke in the wheel. Not only does he do all the marrying and christening, services thought, both at Carleton Hall and Poplar Grove, to be quite indispensable, but the keeping those who misbehave at home on Sunday is one of the most effective punishments which I can inflict. It is a great proof,' he added, "of my young friend's gifts, not only that he has so completely eclipsed the itinerant Methodists, and the vinegar-visaged Presbyterian exhorters, who used formerly to predominate in this neighborhood, but that even black parson Tom himself, for a long — time the admiration not only of my two plantations, — but I may say of the whole county, has been content to restrain his gifts,and to subside into the humble position of clerk and catechist."
Mr Telfair, as I afterwards learnt, had, through the influence of his mother, upon whom, during her state of poverty, religious ideas had made a dee impression, been devoted from an early age to the work of the Christian ministry. From a child, he had esteemed himself set aside for that service; and — having been admitted to holy orders, had given himself up, without stint, to religious labors the greater part of the time, as rector of St Stephen's, a few miles distant.
One of the old parish churches of colonial times, when the church of England was the established religion of North Carolina, and indeed of all the southern states, St Stephen's, since the revolution, had gone into a state of great decay and dilapidation. But though the roof had fallen, and the doors and windows had disappeared, the solid brick walls of the old church had yet remained standing. Mr Telfair, having chosen this neighborhood as a sort of missionary ground, had caused the old church to be repaired, mainly at his own expense, and had with untiring zeal gathered together a congregation, and revived the almost forgotten worship according to the decent ceremonies of the church of England.
As was well befitting the disciple of one who had especially addressed himself to the poor and lowly, the despised and the rejected, the moral and religious condition of the slaves had been from the beginning a subject of very great interest with Mr Telfair. In Mr Mason he had found a zealous coöperator and active church-warden; and the example of the one, and the bland and persuasive exhortations of the other, had not been without a marked influence, in the neighborhood, on the conduct of the masters and the condition of the servants.
But whatever amelioration the system of slavery might be capable of, it was impossible for Mr Telfair, or any other man of observation and humanity, to regard it with any patience as a permanent condition of things. The intimate relations into which he was brought, both with the masters and the slaves, made him thoroughly aware of the false position in which both were placed by it; and for want of any other apparent method of getting rid of so great an evil, he had entered with very great eagerness into the scheme of colonization. He was himself the president of a county colonization society; his personal exhortation had led to the emancipation of several favorite slaves, with the view of sending them to Liberia; and his glowing imagination, overleaping, in the eagerness of benevolent hope, all bounds of time and space, seemed to regard as an event almost at hand the removal of the black and colored population from the United States, and the civilization and Christianization of Africa. So thoroughly did he seem himself convinced, and so did he warm and light up with the subject, that, however visionary his hopes might appear, nothing could be more agreeable than to hear him give utterance to them..
These brilliant hopes, however, we found for the moment obscured by an ominous shadow. Mr Telfair spoke without bitterness, yet not without indications of the most poignant regret, of the late doings of the northern abolitionists, as having put back the cause of emancipation, he feared, for many, many years. He himself had just been made personally to feel their effects. He had established, in connection with his church, a Sunday school for the slaves, in which, besides oral instruction, some of them had been taught to read. A committee of planters had just waited upon him to require him to discontinue this course of instruction — in fact, during the present state of excitement, and, until further notice, to discontinue his slave Sunday school altogether. "Ah, captain Moore," said Mr Telfair, addressing himself to me, this is but an unfavorable time for you to visit the southern states. You see what it is to have slavery in a country. In fact, it makes slaves of the whole of us. It now appears that the liberty of the press, and the freedom of speech, about which we have made so many boasts, cannot be allowed, consistently with the public safety, in countries where slavery prevails. There is at this moment no more liberty of speech or of writing in any slave state — and from the accounts we get of mobs and riots in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the case does not seem to be much Better in the free states — than there is at Rome, Vienna, or Warsaw. I suppose that, in either of those cities, a man is at full liberty to express his opinion, in words or print, of domestic slavery as it exists in America. The only questions forbidden to be discussed there, are those relating to the domestic policy of those cities and countries. So here you may denounce Popery and Russian despotism as loudly as you please; but pray be very careful what you say about domestic slavery. In any mixed company, I should not think it safe, just now, to say what I have said here. In fact, I find myself already a marked man. A printed letter of mine to a friend, on behalf of the colonization scheme, in which, in proof of the evils of slavery, I had quoted from Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other distinguished patriots, when just ready for publication, was seized-the other day, at Richmond, by the committee there, and ordered to be burnt as an incendiary publication."
"Indeed," said I, "then that unfortunate letter of yours was probably part of the bonfire that lighted my entrance into Richmond;" and I went on to give him an account of my adventures in that city. "Not content with burning my letter," so the good clergyman continued, "if, in fact, it was not rather Washington and Jefferson for whom the burning was meant, the Richmond committee have reported me to our county committee as a suspected person, on whom an eye is to be kept; and these good gentlemen, besides putting a stop to my Sunday school, have also taken my newspaper reading under their supervision. For some months past I had received through the post office a newspaper printed at New York, called the "Emancipator." It is, I understand, the chief organ of the new society of abolitionists there. It had been-sent to me gratuitously, and I had read it with a good deal of interest, wishing to discover what its conductors would be at. But this my good friends, or rather masters, of the committee of vigilance, consider altogether too dangerous. They cannot allow the peace of the country to be so perilled. They have forbidden the postmaster to give out the paper any more, and they have forbidden me to take it out or to read it. This is the degree of liberty that exists at present in North Carolina!" — words spoken with an indignant emphasis, and some little bitterness, in spite of the serene self-control which Mr Telfair in general exhibited.
"And how does it happen, gentlemen," said I, "that the evils of slavery which it would appear have been not only pretty largely felt, but pretty freely discussed among you, from the time of Jefferson downward, — and nowhere, as I have been told, more fully and freely than in some recent debates in the Virginia legislature, — how does it happen that this subject has become all at once prohibited? Pray, I should like to learn what is the mighty difference, after all, between colonizationists, like our good friend Mr Telfair here, and these northern abolitionists, whose interference, he seems to think, is likely to prove so serious a damage to the cause of emancipation? Isn't it slavery that you are both alike hostile to? Isn't it emancipation that you are both alike aimin at?" "The difference between us," replied Mr Telfair, "is sufficiently palpable, though I don't so much wonder at your asking the question; for I can perceive, especially since the late excitement broke out, a growing disposition to confound us together, and to set down as incendiary, and as hostile to the welfare of the south, the bare sentiment of dislike to slavery. But with respect to us colonizationists, the case is this: we admit the evils of slavery to be very great — so great that duty to ourselves, our children, to the entire population, black and white, requires from us the greatest efforts to get rid of them. But we do not-see how it is possible to get rid of these evils so long as the black population remains among us. It is a very common opinion in America, that it is impossible for two distinct races of men to live together, at least two races so distinct as the whites and the negroes, on any thing approaching to terms of equality. It seems to be believed that, so long as the blacks remain among us, we must either make slaves of them, or they will turn about and make slaves of us. The late president Jefferson gave expression to this common opinion, by his remark that we hold the slaves like a wolf by the ear, whom it is neither safe to hold nor to let go. I must confess that I, for one, — and a considerable number of our colonization friends would probably concur with me, — do not exactly assent to this view of the case. It seems to me that we whites are the wolf, and the unfortunate negroes the lamb whom we have caught by the ear, and whom, if we only had the will, we might let go without any sort of danger. Why can’t we allow freedom to the negroes as well as to the Trish or the Germans? But with the inveterate prejudices of our people, it seems useless to preach that doctrine. The poorest, meanest, and most degraded of our whites would be all up in arms at the very idea of it. The more low, brutal, and degraded a white man is, the more strenuously does he insist on the natural superiority of the white men, and the more he is shocked at the idea of allowing freedom to the ‘niggers.’ Our colonization system of emancipation yields to this invincible feeling. Before emancipating the slaves, or simultaneously with their emancipation, we propose to remove them out of the country. Regarded by the larger number as completely visionary, and even by us who believe in it, expected to operate, at least at first, only by very slow degrees, this scheme has not been calculated to produce much alarm. Even very vivid pictures of the evils of slavery, and strong declamations against it, have been permitted, so long as they have been regarded only as the expression of speculative opinions and of individual sentiment, accompanied, as they generally are, by the admission, more or less distinct, that, however great these evils may be, there is no hope or means of their removal so long as the two races remain in juxtaposition. "But the new sect of the abolitionists has broken through all these limits. In the first place, they begin with denouncing the holding of slaves as a sin in-consistent with any just pretensions to the character of a Christian. Now, there was a time, and that not many years ago, when the great body of the southern slaveholders would have laughed at this denunciation, because only a small portion of them made any pretension to be Christians, while with large numbers the open avowal of infidel opinions was not uncommon. But by the multiplied labors of the various sects within the last twenty-five years, the profession of Christianity, and in some respects, too, I hope, the practice of it, has very greatly increased among us; and for our good slaveholding people to be told that they are no Christians, touches them in a very sensitive point. In fact, from our excessive squirming at the charge, I cannot but suspect myself that we feel a little as though there was some truth in it.
"Then, again, these abolitionists say your slaves have a right to be free, and it is your duty to set them free at once. You need not trouble yourselves about the consequences of doing your duty; do it, and leave the consequences to God.
"What a difference it makes whether a thing is said in earnest, or only by way of flourish and clap-trap? What a difference when a maxim is to be applied to our own case, and when to that of others! Our good southern Democrats have been preaching for half a century, more or less, that all men are born free and equal — a maxim which they have set forth as the very basis of their political system; but now, when they are asked, not in flourish, in jest merely, but in real earnest, themselves to carry their own doctrine into practice, you see how the wolf shows his teeth!
"You will judge from all this," added Mr Telfair, "that I do not share the ferocious prejudices against the abolitionists, of which you have seen already, since you came among us, so many specimens. They have done me the honor to send me, by the mail, quite a number of their publications, besides the newspaper that I spoke of. I have read them all attentively, and I can safely say, that the vulgar and current charge against them of stimulating the slaves to revolt is totally unfounded. The revolt which they have attempted to stimulate, and the revolt, I am very much inclined to think, of which our committees of vigilance are most afraid, is, a revolt of Christian consciences against the evils and enormities of slavery.
"But, although I admit the rectitude of their motives, I do not any the less on that account condemn their conduct. You can judge from my own case the awkward position in which they have placed every southern well-wisher of the negroes. ‘The only result, I am afraid, will be, to tighten the bonds of the slaves, to check all efforts that have been making for their mental and moral improvement, and to put the most serious obstacles in the way of that scheme of colonization, which is the only remedy for the sore evils of slavery which the south seems in the least to tolerate."