that decaying Commonwealth, “_Sic semper Tyrannis_”; and when one asked the origin of the precaution, one learned that it was the lasting memorial of Gabriel’s insurrection, the stern heritage of terror bequeathed by his defeat.
BETHEL.
We mustered at midnight, in darkness we formed, And the whisper went round of a fort to be stormed; But no drum-beat had called us, no trumpet we heard, And no voice of command, but our Colonel’s low word,– “Column! Forward!”
And out, through the mist and the murk of the morn, From the beaches of Hampton our barges were borne; And we heard not a sound, save the sweep of the oar, Till the word of our Colonel came up from the shore,– “Column! Forward!”
With hearts bounding bravely, and eyes all alight, As ye dance to soft music, so trod we, that night; Through the aisles of the greenwood, with vines overarched, Tossing dew-drops, like gems, from our feet, as we marched,– “Column! Forward!”
As ye dance with the damsels, to viol and flute, So we skipped from the shadows, and mocked their pursuit; But the soft zephyrs chased us, with scents of the morn, As we passed by the hay-fields and green waving corn,– “Column! Forward!”
For the leaves were all laden with fragrance of June, And the flowers and the foliage with sweets were in tune; And the air was so calm, and the forest so dumb, That we heard our own heart-beats, like taps of a drum,– “Column! Forward!”
Till the lull of the lowlands was stirred by a breeze, And the buskins of Morn brushed the tops of the trees, And the glintings of glory that slid from her track By the sheen of our rifles were gayly flung back,– “Column! Forward!”
And the woodlands grew purple with sunshiny mist, And the blue-crested hill-tops with rose-light were kissed, And the earth gave her prayers to the sun in perfumes, Till we marched as through gardens, and trampled on blooms,– “Column! Forward!”
Ay! trampled on blossoms, and seared the sweet breath Of the greenwood with low-brooding vapors of death; O’er the flowers and the corn we were borne like a blast, And away to the fore-front of battle we passed,– “Column! Forward!”
For the cannon’s hoarse thunder roared out from the glades, And the sun was like lightning on banners and blades, When the long line of chanting Zouaves, like a flood, From the green of the woodlands rolled, crimson as blood,– “Column! Forward!”
While the sound of their song, like the surge of the seas, With the “Star-Spangled Banner” swelled over the leas; And the sword of DURYEA, like a torch, led the way, Bearing down on the batteries of Bethel, that day,–[5] “Column! Forward!”
Through green-tasselled cornfields our columns were thrown, And like corn by the red scythe of fire we were mown; While the cannon’s fierce ploughings new-furrowed the plain, That our blood might be planted for LIBERTY’S grain,– “Column! Forward!”
Oh! the fields of fair June have no lack of sweet flowers, But their rarest and best breathe no fragrance like ours; And the sunshine of June, sprinkling gold on the corn, Hath no harvest that ripeneth like BETHEL’S red morn,– “Column! Forward!”
When our heroes, like bridegrooms, with lips and with breath, Drank the first kiss of Danger and clasped her in death; And the heart of brave WINTHROP grew mute, with his lyre, When the plumes of his genius lay moulting in fire,– “Column! Forward!”
Where he fell shall be sunshine as bright as his name, And the grass where he slept shall be green as his fame; For the gold of the Pen and the steel of the Sword Write his deeds–in his blood–on the land he adored,– “Column! Forward!”
And the soul of our comrade shall sweeten the air, And the flowers and the grass-blades his memory upbear; While the breath of his genius, like music in leaves, With the corn-tassels whispers, and sings in the sheaves,– “Column! Forward!”
[Footnote 5: The march on Bethel was begun in high spirits at midnight, but it was near noon when the Zouaves, in their crimson garments, led by Colonel Duryea, charged the batteries, after singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” in chords. Major Winthrop fell in the storming of the enemy’s defences, and was left on the battle-field. Lieutenant Greble, the only other officer killed, was shot at his gun soon after. This fatal contest inaugurated the “war of posts” which has since raged in Virginia.]
THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BUCCANEERS–FLIBUSTIERS–TORTUGA–SETTLEMENT OF THE WESTERN PART OF SAN DOMINGO BY THE FRENCH.
Peaceable voyagers in the West Indies were much astonished at their first sight of certain men, who might have been a new species of native, generated with slight advances upon the old stock by the principle of selection, or spontaneous growths of a soil well guanoed by ferocity. They sported the scarlet suit of the Carib, but of a dye less innocent, as if the fated islands imparted this color to the men who preyed upon them. A cotton shirt hung on their shoulders, and a pair of cotton drawers struggled vainly to cover their thighs: you had to look very closely to pronounce upon the material, it was so stained with blood and fat. Their bronzed faces and thick necks were hirsute, as if overgrown with moss, tangled or crispy. Their feet were tied up in the raw hides of hogs or beeves just slaughtered, from which they also frequently extemporized drawers, cut while reeking, and left to stiffen to the shape of the legs. A heavy-stocked musket, made at Dieppe or Nantes, with a barrel four and a half feet long, and carrying sixteen balls to the pound,[6] lay over the shoulder, a calabash full of powder, with a wax stopper, was slung behind, and a belt of crocodile’s skin, with four knives and a bayonet, went round the waist. These individuals, if the term is applicable to the phenomena in question, were Buccaneers.[7]
The name is derived from the arrangements which the Caribs made to cook their prisoners of war. After being dismembered, their pieces were placed upon wooden gridirons, which were called in Carib, _barbacoa_. It will please our Southern brethren to recognize a congenial origin for their favorite barbecue. The place where these grilling hurdles were set up was called boucan, and the method of roasting and smoking, _boucaner_. The Buccaneers were men of many nations, who hunted the wild cattle, which had increased prodigiously from the original Spanish stock; after taking off the hide, they served the flesh as the Caribs served their captives. There appears to have been a division of employment among them; for some hunted beeves merely for the hide, and others hunted the wild hogs to salt and sell their flesh. But their habits and appearance were the same. The beef-hunters had many dogs, of the old mastiff-breed imported from Spain, to assist in running down their game, with one or two hounds in each pack, who were taught to announce and follow up a trail.
The origin of these men, called Buccaneers, can be traced to a few Norman-French who were driven out of St. Christophe, in 1630, by the Spaniards. This island was settled jointly, but by an accidental coincidence, by French and English, in 1625. They lived tranquilly together for five years: the hunting of Caribs, who disputed their title to the soil, being a bond of union between them which was stronger than national prejudice. But the Spanish power became jealous of this encroachment among the islands, which it affected to own by virtue of Papal dispensation. Though Spain did not care to occupy it, Cuba and the Main being too engrossing, she determined that no other power should do so. She therefore took advantage of disturbances which arose there, in consequence, the French writers affirm, of the perfidious ambition of Albion, and chased both parties out of the island. The French soon recovered possession of it, which they solely held in future; but many exiles never returned, preferring to woo Fortune in company with the French and English adventurers who swarmed in those seas, having withdrawn, for sufficient reasons, from civilized society before a graceful retreat became impossible. This medley of people settled at first upon the northern and western coasts of San Domingo,–the latter being as yet unoccupied. A few settlements of Spaniards upon the northern coast, which suffered from their national antipathies and had endeavored to root them out, were quickly broken up by them. The Dutch, of course, were friendly, and promised to supply them with necessaries in payment for hides, lard, and meat, _boucane_.
Their favorite haunt was the little island Tortuga,[8] so named, some say, from its resemblance to a turtle afloat, and others, from the abundance of that “green and glutinous” delight of aldermen. It is only two or three leagues distant from the northern coast of San Domingo, off the mouth of Trois Rivieres. Its northern side is inaccessible: a boat cannot find a nook or cove into which it may slip for landing or shelter. But there is one harbor upon the southern side, and the Buccaneers took possession of this, and gradually fortified it to make a place tenable against the anticipated assaults of the Spaniards. The soil was thin, but it nourished great trees which seemed to grow from the rocks; water was scarce; the hogs were numerous, smaller and more delicate than those of San Domingo; the sugar-cane flourished; and tobacco of superior quality could be raised. About five-and-twenty Spaniards held the harbor when these adventurers approached to take possession. There were, besides, a few other rovers like themselves, whom the new community adopted. The Spaniards made no resistance, and were suffered to retire.
There was cordial fellowship between the _Flibustiers_ and Buccaneers, for they were all outlaws, without a country, with few national predilections,–men who could not live at home except at the risk of apprehension for vagrancy or crime,–men who ran away in search of adventure when the public ear was ringing with the marvels and riches of the Indies, and when a multitude of sins could be covered by judicious preying. The Spaniards were the victims of this floating and roving St. Giles of the seventeenth century. If England or France went to war with Spain, these freebooters obtained commissions, and their pillaging grew honorable; but it did not subside with the conclusion of a peace. They followed their own policy of lust and avarice, over regions too far from the main history of the times to be controlled.
The word _Flibustier_ is derived from the Dutch _Vlieboot_, fly-boat, swift boat, a kind of small craft whose sailing qualities were superior to those of the other vessels then in vogue. It is possible that the English made freebooter[9] out of the French adaptation. The fly-boat was originally only a long, light pinnace[10] or cutter with oars, fitted also to carry sail; we often find the word used by the French writers to designate vessels which brought important intelligence. They were favorite craft with the _Flibustiers_, not from their swiftness alone, but from their ease of management, and capacity to run up the creeks and river-openings, and to lie concealed. From these they boarded the larger vessels, to plunder or to use them for prolonged freebooting expeditions. The _Flibustier_, then, was a sea-hunter or pirate, as the Buccaneer was a land-hunter, but ready also for pillaging expeditions, in which they cooeperated. And their pursuits were interchangeable: the Buccaneer sometimes went to sea, and the _Flibustier_, in times of marine scarcity, would don the hog-skin breeches, and run down cows or hunt fugitive negroes with packs of dogs. The Buccaneers, however, slowly acquired a tendency to settle, while the _Flibustiers_ preferred to keep the seas, till Europe began to look them up too sharply; so that the former became, eventually, the agricultural nucleus of the western part of San Domingo, when the supply of wild cattle began to fail. This failure happened partly in consequence of their own extravagant hunting-habits, and partly through the agency of the Spaniards of the eastern colony, who thought that by slaughtering the cattle their French neighbors would be driven, for lack of employment, from the soil.
The Buccaneers generally went to the chase in couples, attended by their dogs and _Engages_. These hired or _engaged_ men first appear in the history of the island as valets of the Buccaneers. But, in their case, misfortune rather than vice was the reason of their appearance in such doubtful companionship. They were often sold for debt or inability to pay a rent, as happened in Scotland even during the eighteenth century; they were deluded to take ship by the flaming promises which the captains of vessels issued in the ports of different countries, to recruit their crews, or with the wickeder purpose of kidnapping simple rustics and hangers-on of cities; they sometimes came to a vessel’s side in poverty, and sold their liberty for three years for the sake of a passage to the fabled Ind; press-gangs sometimes stole and smuggled them aboard of vessels just ready to sail; very young people were induced to come aboard,–indeed, one or two cases happened in France, where a schoolmaster and his flock, who were out for a walk, were cajoled by these purveyors of avaricious navigators, and actually carried away from the country. There was, besides, a regular method of supplying the French colonies in the different islands with voluntary _engages_, who agreed to serve for three years at certain wages, with liberty and a small allotment of land at the expiration of the time. These were called “thirty-six months’ men.” Sometimes their regular indenture was respected, and sometimes violently set aside to make the signers virtually slaves. This was done occasionally by the French in imitation of the English. A number of _engages_ at St. Christophe, finding that they were not set at liberty at the expiration of their three years, and that their masters intended to hold them two years more, assembled tumultuously, and threatened to attack the colony. This was in 1632. Their masters were not in sufficient force to carry out their plan, and the Governor was obliged to set at liberty all who had served their time. In 1719, the French Council of State decreed, in consequence of the scarcity of _engages_, that all vagabonds and criminals sentenced to the galleys should be transported for colonial service; and in order to diminish the expense of shipping them, every vessel leaving France for the Antilles was compelled to carry three _engages_ free of expense.
The amount of misery created by these various methods of supplying the islands with human labor cannot be computed. The victims were very humble; the manner of their taking-off was rarely noticed; the spirit of the age never stooped to consider these trifles of sorrow, nor to protect by some legislation the unfortunates who suffered in remote islands, whence their cries seldom reached the ears of authority. It would have been surprising, if many of these _engages_ had not assumed the habits of their masters, and kept the wandering hordes by land and sea recruited. Some of the most famous Buccaneers–for that name popularly included also the _Flibustiers_–were originally thirty-six months’ men who had daring and conduct enough to make the best of their enforced condition.
These _engages_ were in all respects treated as slaves, especially when bound to agricultural service. Their master left them to the mercies of an overseer, who whistled them up at daybreak for wood-cutting or labor in the tobacco-fields, and went about among them with a stout stick, which he used freely to bring the lagging up to their work. Many cruelties are related of these men, but they are of the ordinary kind to be found in the annals of all slave-holding countries. The fact that the _engages_ were indentured only for three years made no difference with men whose sole object was to use up every available resource in the pursuit of wealth. Bad treatment, chagrin, and scurvy destroyed many of them. The French writers accused the English of treating their _engages_ worse than any other nation, as they retained them for seven years, at the end of which time they gave them money enough to procure a lengthened debauch, during which they generally signed away their liberty for seven more years. Oexmelin says that Cromwell sold more than ten thousand Scotch and Irish, destined for Barbadoes. A whole ship-load of these escaped, but perished miserably of famine near Cape Tiburon, at a place which was afterwards called _L’Anse aux Ibernois_.
The first _engages_ were brought by the French from Dieppe: they signed contracts before notaries previously to quitting the country. This class of laborers was eagerly sought by all the colonists of the West Indies, and a good many vessels of different nations were employed in the trade. There was in Brazil a system of letting out land to be worked, called a _labrados_,[11] because a manager held the land from a proprietor for a certain share of the profits, and cultivated it by laborers procurable in various ways. The name of Labrador is derived by some writers from the stealing of natives upon our northern coast by the Portuguese, to be enslaved. It is certain that they did this as early as 1501,[12] and named the coast afterwards _Terra de Laborador_.
The Buccaneers, hunting in couples, called each other _matelot_, or shipmate: the word expresses their amphibious capacity. When a bull was run down by the dogs, the hunter, almost as fleet of foot as they, ran in to hamstring him, if possible,–if not, to shoot him. A certain mulatto became glorious in buccaneering annals for running down his game: out of a hundred hides which he sent to France, ten only were pierced with bullet-holes. When the animal was stripped of its skin, the large bones were drawn from the flesh for the sake of the marrow, of which the two _matelots_ made their stout repast. Portions of the flesh were then _boucane_ by the followers, the rest was left to dogs and birds, and the chase was pursued day by day till a sufficient number of hides were collected. These were transported to the little coves and landing places, where they were exchanged for powder and shot, spirits and silver. Then a grand debauch at Tortuga followed, with the wildest gratification of every passion. Comrades quarrelled and sought each other’s blood; their pleasure ran _amok_ like a mad Malay. When wine was all drunk and the money gamed away, another expedition, with fresh air and beef-marrow, set these independent bankrupts again to rights.
The _Flibustiers_ had an inexpensive way of furnishing themselves with vessels for prosecuting their piratical operations. A dozen of them in a boat would hang about the mouth of a river, or in the vicinity of a Spanish port, enduring the greatest privations with constancy, till they saw a vessel which had good sailing qualities and a fair equipment. If they could not surprise it, they would run down to board it regardless of its fire, and swarm up the side and over the decks in a perfect fury, which nothing could resist, driving the crew into the sea. These expeditions were always prefaced by religious observances. On this point they were very strict; even before each meal, the Catholics chanted the Canticle of Zacharias, the Magnificat, and the Miserere, and the Protestants of all nations read a chapter of the Bible and sang a psalm. For many a Huguenot was in these seas, revenging upon mankind its capability to perpetrate, in the name of religion, a St. Bartholomew’s.
Captain Daniel was a _Flibustier_ with religious tendencies. Finding himself out of poultry, as he lay between Les Saintes and Dominica, (1701,) he approached the former island by night, landed and carried off the _cure_ and some of the principal inhabitants. These were not the fowls he wanted, but rather decoys to the fattest poultry-yards. The account of his exquisite mingling of business and religion gives us a glimpse into the interior of flibustierism. We translate from Father Labat, who had the story from the astonished _cure_. They were very polite to them, he says, “and while the people were bringing in the provisions, they begged the _cure_ to say mass in their vessel, which he did not care to refuse. They sent on shore for the proper accessories, and set up a tent on the quarter-deck, furnished with an altar, to celebrate the mass, which they chanted zealously with the inhabitants who were on board. It was commenced by a discharge of musketry, and of eight pieces of cannon with which their bark was armed. They made a second discharge at the Sanctus, a third at the Elevation, and a fourth at the Benediction, and, finally, a fifth after the Exaudiat and the prayer for the King, which was followed by a ringing _Vive le Roi_. Only one slight incident disturbed a little our devotions. One of the _Flibustiers_, taking an indecent posture during the Elevation, was reprimanded by Captain Daniel. Instead of correcting himself, he made some impertinent answer, accompanied with an execrable oath, which was paid on the spot by the Captain, who pistolled him in the head, swearing before God that he would do the same to the first man who failed in respect for the Holy Sacrifice. The _cure_ was a little flustered, as it happened very close to him. But Daniel said to him, ‘Don’t be troubled, father; ‘t was a rascal whom I had to punish to teach his duty’: a very efficacious way to prevent the recurrence of a similar fault. After mass, they threw the body into the sea, and paid the holy father handsomely for his trouble and his fright. They gave him some valuable clothes, and as they knew that he was destitute of a negro, they made him a present of one,”–“which,” says Father Labat, “I received an order to reclaim, the original owner having made a demand for him.”
Such was Captain Daniel’s rubricated copy of the Buccaneers’ [Greek: Leitourgia]. One may judge from this what the early condition of religion must have been in the French colony of San Domingo, which sprang from these pirates of the land and sea. And it seems that their reverence for the observances diminished in an inverse proportion to their perils. Father Labat said mass in the little town of Cap Francais, in 1701. The chapel was not much better than an _ajoupa_, that is, a four-posted square with a sloping roof of leaves or light boards. The aisle had half a foot of dust in the dry season, and the same depth of mud during rain. “I asked the sacristan, who also filled the office of chanter, if he should chant the Introit, or begin simply with the Kyrie Eleison; but he replied that it was not their custom to chant a great deal, they were content with low mass, brief, and well hurried up, and never chanted except at funerals. However, I did not omit to bless the water and asperse the people; and as I thought that the solemnity of the day demanded a little preaching, I preached, and gave notice that I should say mass on the following day.” This he did, but was infinitely scandalized at the behavior of the people, comparing it with that of the thorough-going Catholics of the other French islands. “They came into the chapel as to an assembly, or to some profane spectacle; they talked, laughed, and joked. The people in the gallery talked louder than I did, and mingled the name of God in their discourse in an insufferable manner. I mildly remonstrated with them three or four times; but seeing that it had no effect, I spoke in a way that compelled some officers to impose silence. A well-behaved person had the goodness to inform me, after mass, that it was necessary to be rather more indulgent with the _People of the Coast_, if one wanted to live with them.” This was an old euphemism for _Flibustiers_. The good father could expect nothing better, especially as so many of his audience may have been Calvinists, for the first habitant at Cap Francais was of that sect. These men were trying to become settled; and the alternative was between rapine with religion and raising crops without it. The latter became the habitude of the island; for the descendants of the Buccaneers could afford the luxury of absolute sincerity, which even their hardy progenitors were too weak to seize.
In the other Islands, however, the priest had the colonists well in hand, as may be understood from the lofty language which he could assume towards petty sacramental infractions. At St. Croix, for instance, three light fellows made a mock of Sunday and the mass, saying, “We go a-fishing,” and tried to persuade some neighbors to accompany them.
“No; ‘t is Trinity Sunday, and we shall go to mass.”
“And will the Trinity help you to your dinner? Come, mass will keep for another time.”
The decent neighbors refusing, these three unfortunate men departed, and were permitted by an inscrutable Providence to catch a great number of little fishes, which they shared with their conforming neighbors. All ate of them, but with this difference, that the three anti-sabbatarians fell sick, and died in twenty-four hours, while the others experienced no injury. The effect of this gastric warning is somewhat weakened by the incautious statement of the narrative, that a priest, who ran from one dying man to another, became overheated, and contracted a fatal illness.
The Catholic profession brought no immunity to the Spanish navigators. Our _Flibustiers_, strengthened by religious exercises, and a pistol in each hand, stormed upon the deck, as if they had fallen from the clouds. “_Jesus, son demonios estos_”: “They are demons, and not men.” After they had thus “cleared” their vessel, they entered into a contract, called _chasse-partie_, the articles of which regulated their voyage and the disposition of the booty. They were very minutely made out. Here are some of the awards and reimbursements. The one who discovered a prize earned one hundred crowns; the same amount, or a slave, recompensed for the loss of an eye. Two eyes were rated at six hundred crowns, or six slaves. For the loss of the right hand or arm two hundred crowns or two slaves were paid, and for both six hundred crowns. When a _Flibustier_ had a wound which obliged him to carry surgical helps and substitutes, they paid him two hundred crowns, or two slaves. If he had not entirely lost a member, but was only deprived of its use, he was recompensed the same as if the member had disappeared.
“They have also regard to qualities and places. Thus, the captain or chief is allotted five or six portions to what the ordinary seamen have, the master’s mate only two, and other officers proportionable to their employ, after which they draw equal parts from the highest to the lowest mariner, the boys not being omitted, who draw half a share, because, when they take a better vessel than their own, it is the boys’ duty to fire their former vessel and then retire to the prize.”
Among the conventions of English pirates we find some additional articles which show a national difference. Whoever shall steal from the company, or game up to the value of a piece of eight, (piastre, translated _ecu_ by the French,–rated by the English of that day at not quite five shillings sterling,–about a dollar,) shall be landed on a desert place, with a bottle of water, gun, powder, and lead. Whoever shall maltreat or assault another, while the articles subsist, shall receive the Law of Moses: this was the infliction of forty consecutive strokes upon the back, a whimsical memento of the dispensation in the Wilderness. There were articles relative to the treatment and disposition of women, which sometimes depended upon the tossing of a coin,–_jeter a croix pile_,–but they need not be repeated: on this point the French were worse than the English.
The English generally wound up their convention with the solemn agreement that not a man should speak of separation till the gross earnings amounted to one thousand pounds per head. Then the whole company associated by couples, for mutual support in anticipation of wounds and danger, and to devise to each other all their effects in case of death. While at sea, or engaged in expeditions against the coasts of Terra Firma, their friendship was of the most romantic kind, inspired by a common feeling of outlawry, and colored by the risks of their atrocious employment. They called themselves “Brothers of the Coast,” and took a solemn oath not to secrete from each other any portion of the common spoil, nor uncharitably to disregard each other’s wants. Violence and lust would have gone upon bootless ventures, if justice and generosity had not been crimped to strengthen the crew.
These buccaneering conventions were gradually imposed upon all the West-Indian neighborhood, by the title of uncompromising strength, and became known as the “Usage of the Coast.” When the Brothers met with any remonstrance which referred the rights of navigators and settlers back to the Common Law of Europe, they were accustomed to defend their Usage, saying that their baptism had absolved them from all previous obligations. This was an allusion to the marine ceremony called in later times “Crossing the Line,” and administered only upon that occasion; but at first it was performed when vessels were passing the Raz de Fonteneau, on their way to and from the Channel, and originated before navigators crossed the Atlantic or passed the Tropic of Cancer. The Raz, or Tide-Race, was a dangerous passage off the coast of Brittany; some religious observance among the early sailors, dictated by anxiety, appears to have degenerated into the Neptunian frolic, which included a copious christening of salt water for the raw hands, and was kept up long after men had ceased to fear the unknown regions of the ocean. Perhaps an aspersion with holy-water was a part of the original rite, on the ground that the mariner was passing into new countries, once thought uninhabited, as into a strange new-world, to sanctify the hardiness and propitiate the Ruler of Sea and Air. The Dutch, also, performed some ceremony in passing the rocks, then called Barlingots, which lie off the mouth of the Tagus. Gradually the usage went farther out to sea; and the farther it went, of course, the more unrestrained it grew.
This was the baptism which regenerated Law for the Buccaneers. It also absolved them from the use of their own names, which might, indeed, in many cases have been but awkward conveniences; and they were not known except by _sobriquets_. But when they became _habitans_ or settlers, and took wives, their surnames appeared for the first time in the marriage-contract; so that it was a proverb in the islands,–“You don’t know people till they marry.”
The institution of marriage was not introduced among the Buccaneers for many years after their settlement of the western coast. In the mean time they selected women for extemporaneous partners, to whom they addressed a few significant words before taking them home to their _ajoupas_, to the effect that their antecedents were not worth minding, but _this_, slightly tapping the musket, “which never deceived me, will avenge me, if _you_ do.”
These women, with the exception of one or two organized emigrations of poor, but honest, girls, were the sweepings of the streets of Paris and London. They were sometimes deported with as little ceremony as the _engages_, and sometimes collected by the Government, especially of France, for the deliberate purpose of meeting the not over nice demands of the adventurers; for it was the interest of France to pet Tortuga and the western coast. All the French islands were stocked in the same manner. Du Tertre devotes a page to the intrigues of a Mademoiselle de la Fayolle, who appeared in St. Christophe with a strong force of these unfortunate women, in 1643. They were collected from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paris, to prevent the colonists from leaving the island in search of wives. Mademoiselle came with letters from the Queen and other ladies of quality, and quite dazzled M. Aubert, the Governor, who proposed to his wife that she should be accommodated in the chateau. She had a restless and managing temper, and her power lasted as long as her merchandise.
In 1667 there was an auction-sale of fifty girls without character at Tortuga. They went off so well that fifty more were soon supplied. Schoelcher says that in the twelfth volume of the “Archives de la Marine” there is a note of “one hundred nymphs for the Antilles and a hundred more for San Domingo,” under the date of 1685.
Here were new elements of civilization for the devoted island, whose earliest colonists were pirates pacified by prostitutes. They were the progenitors of families whom wealth and colonial luxury made famous; for in such a climate a buccaneering nickname will soon flower into titles which conceal the gnarled and ugly stock. Some of these French Dianas led a healthy and hardy life with their husbands, followed them to the chase, and emulated their exploits with the pistol and the knife. Some blood was thus renewed while some grew more depraved, else the colony would have rotted from the soil.
Nature struggles to keep all her streams fresh and clear. The children of adventurers may inherit the vices of their parents; but Nature silently puts her fragrant graft into the withering tree, and it learns to bud with unexpected fruit. Inheritance is only one of Mother Nature’s emphatic protestations that her wayward children will be the death of her; but she knows better than that, unfortunately for the respectable vice and meanness which flourish in every land and seek to prolong their line. California and Australia soon reach the average of New York and London, and invite Nature to preserve through them, too, her world. She drains and plants these unwholesome places; powerful men and lovely women are the Mariposa cedars which attest her splendid tillage. But a part of this Nature consists of conservative decency in men who belong to law-abiding and Protestant races. For want of this, surgery and cautery became Nature’s expedients for Hayti, which was one of the worst sinks on her great farm.
If a greater number of female emigrants had been like Mary Read, pirate as she was, the story of Hayti would have been modified. She had the character which Nature loves to civilize.
Mary Read was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishwoman, who brought her up as a boy, after revealing to her the secret of her origin, apparently wishing to protect her against the mischances which befell herself. She was first a footman, then a sailor on board a man-of-war; afterwards she served with great bravery in Flanders in a regiment of infantry. Then she entered a cavalry regiment, where she fell deeply in love with a comrade, and her woman’s nature awoke. Obeying the uncontrollable instinct, she modestly revealed her sex to him, and was married with great _eclat_, after he had sought in vain, repelled by her high conduct, to make her less than wife. He died soon after, and the Peace of Ryswick compelled her to assume her male attire again and seek employment. She went before the mast in a vessel bound for the West Indies, which was taken by English pirates, with whom she afterwards enjoyed the benefit of a royal proclamation pardoning all pirates who submitted within a limited period. Their money gave out, and they enlisted under a privateer captain to cruise against the Spaniards; but the men, finding a favorable opportunity, took the vessel from the officers, and commenced their old trade. Mary was as brave as any in boarding Spanish craft, pistol in hand, to clear the decks; no peril made her falter, but she was disarmed again by love in the person of a fine young pirate of superior mind and grace. She made a friend of him, revealed her sex, and married him. Her husband had a falling-out with a comrade, and a duel impended. Torn with love and dread, she managed to pick a quarrel with his antagonist, appointed a meeting an hour before the one which her husband expected, and was lucky enough to postpone the latter indefinitely. At her trial in Jamaica, she would have escaped through the compassion of the court, if some one had not deposed that she often deliberately defended piracy with the argument that pirates were fortunately amenable to capital punishment, and this was a restraint to cowards, without which a thousand rascals who passed for honest people, but who did nothing but pillage widows and orphans and defraud their neighbors, would rush into a more honorable profession, the ocean would be covered with this _canaille_, and the ruin of commerce would involve that of piracy. She died in prison of a fever.
Ann Bonny was born in Cork. She was of a truculent disposition, and the murdering part of piracy was much to her taste. When her husband was led out to execution, the special favor was granted of an interview with her; but her only benediction was,–“I’m sorry to find ye in this state; if ye had fought like a man, ye would not be seein’ yerself hung like a dog.”
But what could angels themselves have done to make Captain Teach presentable in the best society? _Blackbeard_ was his _sobriquet_, for he had one flowing over his chest which patriarchs might be forgiven for coveting. The hair of his head was tastefully done up with ribbons, and inframed his truculent face. When he went into a fight, three pairs of pistols hung from a scarf, and two slow-matches, alight and projecting under his hat, glowed above his cruel eyes. Certainly, the light of battle was not in his case a metaphor.
On board his vessel, one day, Captain Teach, just combing upon strong-water, summoned his crew. “Go to, now, let us make a hell,” he cried, “and get a little seasoned. We’ll find who can stand it longest.” Thereupon they all went down into the hold, which he had carefully battened down; then he lighted sundry pots of sulphur, and showed superior qualifications for the future by smoking them all out.
On the day of his last combat, when advised to confide to his wife where his money was hid, he refused, saying that only he and the Devil knew where it was, and the survivor was to have it.
Whenever these English pirates found a clergyman, they acted as if pillaging had been only a last resort, owing to the scarcity of that commodity in those seas. Captain Roberts took a vessel which had on board a body of English troops with their chaplain, destined for garrison-duty. His crew went into ecstasies of delight, as if they had separated themselves from mankind and incurred atrocious suspicions from their desire to seek for religious persons in all places. They wanted nothing but a chaplain; they had never wanted anything else; he must join them; he would have nothing to do but to pray and make the punch. As he steadily refused, they reluctantly parted with him; but, smitten with his firmness, they retained of his effects nothing but three prayer-books and a corkscrew.
These were but common villains. The genuine _Flibustier_ mingled national hatred with his avarice, and harried the Spanish coasts with a sense of being the avenger of old affronts, at least the divine instrument of his country’s honest instincts, whose duty it was to smite and spoil, as if the Armada were yet upon the seas as the Inquisition was upon the land. Frenchmen and Englishmen, Huguenot and Dutch Calvinists, Willis, Warner, Montbar the Exterminator, Levasseur, Lolonois, Henry Morgan, Coxon and Sharp, Bartholomew the Portuguese, Rock the Dutchman, were representative men. They gave a villanous expression, and an edge which avarice whetted, to the religious patriotism of their countrymen. The sombre and deadly prejudices which lay half torpid in their cage at home escaped from restraint in these men, and suddenly acted out their proper nature on the highways of the world.
We have no space to record particular deeds and cruelties. The stories of the exploits of the _Flibustiers_ show that their outlaw-life had developed all the powerful traits which make pioneering or the profession of arms so illustrious. Audacity, cunning, great endurance, tenacity of purpose, all the character of the organizing nations whence they sprang, appeared in them so stained by murder and bestiality of every kind, that the impression made by their career is revolting, and gets no mitigation from their better qualities. They were generous to each other, and scrupulously just; but it was for the sake of strengthening their hands against mankind. They fought against the enemies of their respective nations with all the fiendishness of popular hate that has broken loose from popular restraints and civilizing checks and has become a beast. Commerce was nothing to them but a convenience for plunder; a voyaging ship was an oasis in the mid-waste on which they swarmed for an orgy of avarice and gluttony; the cities of the Spanish Main were hives of wealth and women to be overturned and rifled, and their mother-country a retreat where the sanctimonious old age of a few survivors of these successful crimes could display their money and their piety, and perhaps a titled panel on their coach. Henry Morgan was knighted, and made a good end in the Tower of London as a political prisoner. Pierre le Grand, the first _Flibustier_ who took a ship, retired to France with wealth and consideration. Captain Avery, who had an immense fame, was the subject of a drama entitled “The Happy Pirate,” which inoculated many a prentice-lad with cutlasses and rollicking ferocity. Others became the agents of easy cabinets who always winked at buccaneering, because it so often saved them the expense of war. What gift or place would a slave-holding cabinet, or a Southern Confederacy, have thought too dear to bestow upon Captain Walker, whose criminal acts were feeding the concealed roots of the Great Conspiracy, if his murder and arson had become illustrious by success?
The _Flibustiers_ were composed of many nations. The Buccaneers were mostly French. Their head-quarters, or principal _boucans_, upon San Domingo, were on the peninsula of Samana, at Port Margot, Savanna Brulee near Gonaives, and the landing-place of Mirebalais. The Spaniards gained at first several advantages over them by cutting off the couples which were engaged in chasing the wild cattle. This compelled the Buccaneers to associate in larger bands, and to add Spaniards to their list of game. The word _massacre_ on the maps of the island marks places where sanguinary surprises were effected by either party; but the Spaniards lost more blood than their wily antagonists, and were compelled to abandon all their settlements on the northern and northeastern coasts and to fall back upon San Domingo and their other towns. The _Flibustiers_ blockaded their rivers, intercepted the vessels of slave-traders of all nations, made prizes of the cargoes, and sold them to the French of the rising western colony, to the English at Jamaica, or among the other islands, wherever a contraband speculation could be made. This completed the ruin of Spanish San Domingo; for the Government, crippled by land- and sea-fights with English, French, and Dutch, was unable to protect its colonies. It is very strange to notice this sudden weakness of the nation which was lately so domineering; the causes which produced it have been stated elsewhere[13] with great research and power.
The Spaniards had made a few settlements in the western part of the island, the principal one of which was Yaguana, or Leogane. They were too far from the eastern population to be successfully defended or succored, in case of the attacks which were constantly expected after Drake’s expedition. In 1592, the town of Azua was taken and destroyed by an English force under Christopher Newport, who was making war against the Spaniards on his own account. He afterwards attacked Yaguana, was at first repulsed, but took it by night and burned it to the ground. In consequence of this, all the western settlements were abandoned; and not a Spaniard remained in that part of the island after 1606. Cruisers of other nations seized the ports for their private convenience.
A brief outline will suffice to conduct us to the secure establishment of the French in Western San Domingo. Tortuga was attacked by the Spaniards in 1638; the Buccaneers were surprised, put to the sword, and scattered. A few joined their brethren in San Domingo. Their discomfiture was thought to be so complete that no garrison was left upon Tortuga. At the same time the Spaniards organized bands of fifty men each, called _la cinquantaine_ by the French Buccaneers, to serve as a kind of rural police to hunt down the latter and exterminate them. For safety the French collected, and put at their head Willis, an Englishman, who had just then appeared with two or three hundred men, with the view of joining those of his countrymen who were Buccaneers. He led them back to Tortuga, and threw up some rude works to command the harbor. But the national antipathies soon appeared, on the occasion of some encroachment of Willis, whose countrymen were the more numerous party. The French despatched secret agents to St. Christophe, who made it clear to M. de Poincy, the Governor of that island, that the English could be easily dispossessed by a small force attacking them from without, while the French rose within. The Governor thought it was a good opportunity to weed the Huguenots, who were always making trouble about religious matters, out of his colony; he did not hesitate, therefore, to cooperate with the outlaws for so nice a game as driving out the English by getting rid of his heretics. The operation was intrusted to M. Levasseur, a brave and well-instructed Huguenot officer, who took with him about a hundred men. Willis decamped at their first summons, knowing the temper of his French subjects; and Levasseur landed, and immediately began to fortify a platform-rock which rose only a few paces from the water’s edge. This he intrenched, surrounding an open square capable of accommodating three or four hundred men. A never-failing spring gushed from the rock for the supply of a garrison. From the middle of this platform there rose conveniently another rock thirty feet high, with scarped sides, upon which he built a block-house for himself and the ammunition, communicating with the platform by a movable ladder of iron. He made the place so formidable as a buccaneering centre that the Spaniards resolved to attack it. They tried it at first from the sea, but, being well battered, retired and disembarked six hundred men by night to make a land-attack. They were defeated, with the loss of a hundred men.
Levasseur appears to have grown arrogant with his success. He began to abuse and persecute all the Catholics, burned their chapel, and drove away a priest. He had stocks set up, made of iron, which he called his Hell, and the fort where he kept it, Purgatory. Du Tertre says that he wanted to make of Tortuga a little Geneva. He disavowed the authority of M. de Poincy, and when the latter demanded restitution of a _Notre Dame_ of silver which the _Flibustiers_ had taken from a Spanish vessel, he sent a model of it, constructed of wood, with the message that Catholics were too spiritual to attach any value to the material, but as for himself, he had a liking for the metal. Levasseur was assassinated by two of his captains after a reign of a dozen years.
The next Governor sent by De Poincy to Tortuga was a Catholic, the Chevalier Fontenay. The religion of this stronghold changed, but not its habits. The Spaniards planned a second attack upon it in 1653, and succeeded by dragging a couple of light cannon up the mountain so as to command the donjon built by Levasseur. The French took refuge upon the coast of San Domingo, where they waited for an opportunity to repossess their little island. This soon followed upon an application made by De Rausset, one of Levasseur’s old comrades, to the French West India Company for a sufficient force to drive out the Spaniards. De Rausset’s plan succeeded, Tortuga passed permanently into French hands, and the Spaniards confined themselves for the future to annoying the new colonies of Buccaneers which overflowed upon San Domingo. But their efforts disappear after a terrible defeat inflicted upon them in 1665, which the _Flibustiers_ followed up by the sack and destruction of Santiago, the town second in importance to San Domingo. Henceforth the history of the island belongs to France.
[To be continued.]
[Footnote 6: This musket was afterwards called _fusil boucanier_. _Fusil demi-boucanier_ was the same kind, with a shorter barrel.]
[Footnote 7: _Histoire des Avanturiers Flibustiers, avec la Vie, les Moeurs, et les Coutumes des Boucaniers_, par A.O. Oexmelin, who went out to the West Indies as a poor _Engage_, and became a Buccaneer. Four Volumes. New Edition, printed in 1744: Vol. III., containing the Journal of a Voyage made with _Flibustiers_ in the South Sea in 1685, by Le Sieur Ravenau de Lussan; and Vol. IV., containing a History of English pirates, with the Lives of two Female Pirates, Mary Read and Ann Bonny, and Extracts from Pirate-Codes: translated from the English of Captain Charles Johnson.–Charlevoix, _Histoire de St. Domingue_, Vols. III. and IV.–_The History of the Bucaniers of America, from the First Original down to this Time; written in several Languages, and now collected into One Volume._ Third Edition, London, 1704: containing Portraits of all the Celebrated _Flibustiers,_ and Plans of some of their Land-Attacks.–_Nouveaux Voyages aux Isles Francoises de l’Amerique_, par le Pere Labat, 1724, Tom. V, pp. 228-230. See also Archenholtz.]
[Footnote 8: Not to be confounded with the Tortugas, the westernmost islands of the Florida Keys (_Cayos_, Spanish for rocks, shoals, or islets).]
[Footnote 9: Charlevoix will have it reversed, and derives _flibustier_ from _freebooter;_ but this English word is not old enough to have been a vagrom in those seas at that time. Webster derives it from the Dutch _Vrijbuiter;_ but that and the corresponding German word were themselves derived. Schoelcher says that it is a corruption of an English word, _fly-boater_, one who manages a fly-boat; and he adds,–“Our _flibot_, a small and very fast craft, draws its origin from the English _fly-boat, bateau mouche, bateau volant_.” But this is only a kind of pun. Perhaps the Dutch named it so, not from its swiftness, but from its resemblance, with its busy oars and darting motions, to a slender-legged fly. There appears to be no ground for saying that the boat was so called because it first came into use upon the river Vlie in Holland. It might have been a boat used by the inhabitants of Vlieland, a town on the island of the same name, north of Texel. _Freebooter_ is such a good word for _flibustier_ that it was easy to accuse it of the parentage.]
[Footnote 10: Pinnaces of five or six tons, which could be packed on shipboard in pieces and put together when wanted, were built in the reign of Elizabeth. The name is of Spanish origin, from the pine used for material.]
[Footnote 11: See a contract of this kind in _Histoire Generale des Antilles_, Du Tertre, Tom. I. p. 464.]
[Footnote 12: Bancroft’s _United States_, Vol. I. p. 14.]
[Footnote 13: Buckle’s _History of Civilization_, Vol. II. chap. 1.]
A COMPLAINT OF FRIENDS.
If things would not run into each other so, it would be a thousand times easier and a million times pleasanter to get on in the world. Let the sheepiness be set on one side and the goatiness on the other, and immediately you know where you are. It is not necessary to ask that there be any increase of the one or any diminution of the other, but only that each shall preempt its own territory and stay there. Milk is good, and water is good, but don’t set the milk-pail under the pump. Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the clever people rich and handsome, and left poverty and ugliness to the stupid people; because–don’t you see?–the stupid people won’t know they are ugly, and won’t care if they are poor, but the clever people will be hampered and tortured. I would have given the good wives to the good husbands, and made drunken men marry drunken women. Then there would have been one family exquisitely happy, instead of two struggling against misery. I would have made the rose-stem downy, and put all the thorns on the thistles. I would have gouged out the jewel from the toad’s head, and given the peacock the nightingale’s voice, and not set everything so at half and half.
But that is the way it is. We find the world made to our hand. The wise men marry the foolish virgins, and the splendid virgins marry dolts, and matters in general are so mixed up that the choice lies between nice things about spoiled and vile things that are not so bad after all, and it is hard to tell sometimes which you like best or which you loathe least.
I expect to lose every friend I have in the world by the publication of this paper–except the dunces who are impaled in it. They will never read it, and if they do, will never suspect I mean them; while the sensible and true friends, who do me good and not evil all the days of their lives, will think I am driving at their noble hearts, and will at once haul off and leave me inconsolable. Still I am going to write it. You must open the safety-valve once in a while, even if the steam does whiz and shriek, or there will be an explosion, which is fatal, while the whizzing and shrieking are only disagreeable.
Doubtless friendship has its advantages and its pleasures; doubtless hostility has its isolations and its revenges: still, if called upon to choose once for all between friends and foes, I think, on the whole, I should cast my vote for the foes. Twenty enemies will not do you the mischief of one friend. Enemies you always know where to find. They are in fair and square perpetual hostility, and you keep your armor on and your sentinels posted; but with friends you are inveigled into a false security, and, before you know it, your honor, your modesty, your delicacy are scudding before the gales. Moreover, with your friend you can never make reprisals. If your enemy attacks you, you can always strike back and hit hard. You are expected to defend yourself against him to the top of your bent. He is your legal opponent in honorable warfare. You can pour hot-shot into him with murderous vigor; and the more he wriggles, the better you feel. In fact, it is rather refreshing to measure swords once in a while with such a one. You like to exert your power and keep yourself in practice. You do not rejoice so much in overcoming your enemy as in overcoming. If a marble statue could show fight, you would just as soon fight it; but as it cannot, you take something that can, and something, besides, that has had the temerity to attack you, and so has made a lawful target of itself. But against your friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you. He has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You cannot hurl a thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable, against those amiable monsters who with tenderest fingers are sticking pins all over you. So you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a good, stout, brawny, malignant foe, who, under any and every circumstance, will design you harm, and on whom you can lavish your lusty blows with a hearty will and a clear conscience.
Your enemy keeps clear of you. He neither grants nor claims favors. He awards you your rights,–no more, no less,–and demands the same from you. Consequently there is no friction. Your friend, on the contrary, is continually getting himself tangled up with you “because he is your friend.” I have heard that Shelley was never better pleased than when his associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois; and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and miss a book of which I am in immediate and pressing need, because an intimate friend has carried it off without asking leave, on the score of his intimacy. I have not, and do not wish to have, any alliance that shall abrogate the eighth commandment. A great mistake is lying round loose hereabouts,–a mistake fatal to many friendships that did run well. The common fallacy is, that intimacy dispenses with the necessity of politeness. The truth is just the opposite of this. The more points of contact there are, the more danger of friction there is, and the more carefully should people guard against it. If you see a man only once a month, it is not of so vital importance that you do not trench on his rights, tastes, or whims. He can bear to be crossed or annoyed occasionally. If he does not have a very high regard for you, it is comparatively unimportant, because your paths are generally so diverse. But you and the man with whom you dine every day have it in your power to make each other exceedingly uncomfortable. A very little dropping will wear away rock, if it only keep at it. The thing that you would not think of, if it occurred only twice a year, becomes an intolerable burden when it happens twice a day. This is where husbands and wives run aground. They take too much for granted. If they would but see that they have something to gain, something to save, as well as something to enjoy, it would be better for them; but they proceed on the assumption that their love is an inexhaustible tank, and not a fountain depending for its supply on the stream that trickles into it. So, for every little annoying habit, or weakness, or fault, they draw on the tank without being careful to keep the supply open, till they awake one morning to find the pump dry, and, instead of love, at best, nothing but a cold habit of complacence. On the contrary, the more intimate friends become, whether married or unmarried, the more scrupulously should they strive to repress in themselves everything annoying, and to cherish both in themselves and each other everything pleasing. While each should draw on his love to neutralize the faults of his friend, it is suicidal to draw on his friend’s love to neutralize his own faults. Love should be cumulative, since it cannot be stationary. If it does not increase, it decreases. Love, like confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and of most exotic fragility. It must be constantly and tenderly cherished. Every noxious and foreign element must be carefully removed from it. All sunshine, and sweet airs, and morning dews, and evening showers must breathe upon it perpetual fragrance, or it dies into a hideous and repulsive deformity, fit only to be cast out and trodden under foot of men, while, properly cultivated, it is a Tree of Life.
Your enemy keeps clear of you not only in business, but in society. If circumstances thrust him into contact with you, he is curt and centrifugal. But your friend breaks in upon your “saintly solitude” with perfect equanimity. He never for a moment harbors a suspicion that he can intrude, “because he is your friend.” So he drops in on his way to the office to chat half an hour over the latest news. The half-hour isn’t much in itself. If it were after dinner, you wouldn’t mind it; but after breakfast every moment “runs itself in golden sands,” and the break in your time crashes a worse break in your temper. “Are you busy?” asks the considerate wretch, adding insult to injury. What can you do? Say yes and wound his self-love forever? But he has a wife and family. You respect their feelings, smile and smile, and are villain enough to be civil with your lips, and hide the poison of asps under your tongue, till you have a chance to relieve your o’ercharged heart by shaking your fist in impotent wrath at his retreating form. You will receive the reward of your hypocrisy as you richly deserve, for ten to one he will drop in again when he comes back from his office, and arrest you wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that you are neither reading nor writing,–the absurd dolt! as if a man weren’t at work unless he be wielding a sledge-hammer!–he will preach out, and prose out, and twaddle out another hour of your golden even-tide, “because he is your friend.” You don’t care whether he is judge or jury,–whether he talks sense or nonsense; you don’t want him to talk at all. You don’t want him there any way. You want to be alone. If you don’t, why are you sitting there in the deepening twilight? If you wanted him, couldn’t you send for him? Why don’t you go out into the drawing-room, where are music, and lights, and gay people? What right have I to suppose, that, because you are not using your eyes, you are not using your brain? What right have I to set myself up as judge of the value of your time, and so rob you of perhaps the most delicious hour in all your day, on pretence that it is of no use to you?–take a pound of flesh clean out of your heart and trip on my smiling way as if I had not earned the gallows?
And what in Heaven’s name is the good of all this ceaseless talk? To what purpose are you wearied, exhausted, dragged out and out to the very extreme of tenuity? A sprightly badinage,–a running fire of nonsense for half an hour,–a tramp over unfamiliar ground with a familiar guide,–a discussion of something with somebody who knows all about it, or who, not knowing, wants to learn from you,–a pleasant interchange of commonplaces with a circle of friends around the fire, at such hours as you give to society: all this is not only tolerable, but agreeable,–often positively delightful; but to have an indifferent person, on no score but that of friendship, break into your sacred presence, and suck your blood through indefinite cycles of time, is an abomination. If he clatters on an indifferent subject, you can do well enough for fifteen minutes, buoyed up by the hope that he will presently have a fit, or be sent for, or come to some kind of an end. But when you gradually open to the conviction that _vis inertiae_ rules the hour, and the thing which has been is that which shall be, you wax listless; your chariot-wheels drive heavily; your end of the pole drags in the mud, and you speedily wallow in unmitigated disgust. If he broaches a subject on which you have a real and deep living interest, you shrink from unbosoming yourself to him. You feel that it would be sacrilege. He feels nothing of the sort. He treads over your heart-strings in his cow-hide brogans, and does not see that they are not whip-cords. He pokes his gold-headed cane in among your treasures, blind to the fact that you are clutching both arms around them, that no gleam of flashing gold may reveal their whereabouts to him. You draw yourself up in your shell, projecting a monosyllabic claw occasionally as a sign of continued vitality; but the pachyderm does not withdraw, and you gradually lower into an indignation,–smothered, fierce, intense.
Why, _why_, WHY will people inundate their unfortunate victims with such “weak, washy, everlasting floods”? Why will they haul everything out into the open day? Why will they make the Holy of Holies common and unclean? Why will they be so ineffably stupid as not to see that there is that which speech profanes? Why will they lower their drag-nets into the unfathomable waters, in the vain attempt to bring up your pearls and gems, whose lustre would pale to ashes in the garish light,–whose only sparkle is in the deep sea-soundings? _Procul, O procul este, profani!_
Oh, the matchless power of silence! There are words that concentrate in themselves the glory of a lifetime; but there is a silence that is more precious than they. Speech ripples over the surface of life, but silence sinks into its depths. Airy pleasantnesses bubble up in airy, pleasant words. Weak sorrows quaver out their shallow being and are not. When the heart is cleft to its core, there is no speech nor language.
Do not now, Messrs. Bores, think to retrieve your characters by coming into my house and sitting mute for two hours. Heaven forbid that your blood should be found on my skirts! but I believe I shall kill you, if you do. The only reason why I have not laid violent hands on you heretofore is that your vapid talk has operated as a wire to conduct my electricity to the receptive and kindly earth; but if you intrude upon my magnetisms without any such life-preserver, your future in this world is not worth a crossed six-pence. Your silence would break the reed that your talk but bruised. The only people with whom it is a joy to sit silent are the people with whom it is a joy to talk. Clear out!
Friendship plays the mischief in the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offences are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head and front, the bones and blood of their creed. It is not the direction of the quality, but the quality itself, which they swear by. Only stick, it is no matter what you stick to. Fall out with a man, and you can kiss and be friends as soon as you like; the recording angel will set it down on the credit side of his books. Fall in, and you are expected to stay in, _ad infinitum_, _ad nauseam_. No matter what combination of laws got you there, there you are, and there you must stay, for better, for worse, till merciful Death you do part,–or you are–“fickle.” You find a man entertaining for an hour, a week, a concert, a journey, and _presto!_ you are saddled with him forever. What preposterous absurdity! Do but look at it calmly. You are thrown into contact with a person, and, as in duty bound, you proceed to fathom him: for every man is a possible revelation. In the deeps of his soul there may lie unknown worlds for you. Consequently you proceed at once to experiment on him. It takes a little while to get your tackle in order. Then the line begins to run off rapidly, and your eager soul cries out, “Ah! what depth! What perpetual calmness must be down below! What rest is here for all my tumult! What a grand, vast nature is this!” Surely, surely, you are on the high seas. Surely, you will now float serenely down the eternities! But by-and-by there is a kink. You find, that, though the line runs off so fast, it does not go down,–it only floats out. A current has caught it and bears it on horizontally. It does not sink plumb. You have been deceived. Your grand Pacific Ocean is nothing but a shallow little brook that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little tormenting river, that won’t and can’t sail a sloop. What are you going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom the keel continually grates and rasps your nerves–simply that your reputation suffer no detriment? Fickleness? There was no fickleness about it. You were trying an experiment which you had every right to try. As soon as you were satisfied, you stopped. If you had stopped sooner, you would have been unsatisfied. If you had stopped later, you would have been dissatisfied. It is a criminal contempt of the magnificent possibilities of life not to lay hold of “God’s occasions floating by.” It is an equally criminal perversion of them to cling tenaciously to what was only the _simulacrum_ of an occasion. A man will toil many days and nights among the mountains to find an ingot of gold, which, found, he bears home with infinite pains and just rejoicing; but he would be a fool who should lade his mules with iron-pyrites to justify his labors, however severe.
Fickleness! what is it, that we make such an ado about it? And what is constancy, that it commands such usurious interest? The one is a foible only in its relations. The other is only thus a virtue. “Fickle as the winds” is our death-seal upon a man; but should we like our winds un-fickle? Would a perpetual Northeaster lay us open to perpetual gratitude? or is a soft South gale to be orisoned and vespered forevermore?
I am tired of this eternal prating of devotion and constancy. It is senseless in itself and harmful in its tendencies. The dictate of reason is to treat men and women as we do oranges. Suck all the juice out and then let them go. Where is the good of keeping the peel and pulp-cells till they get old, dry, and mouldy? Let them go, and they will help feed the earth-worms and bugs and beetles who can hardly find existence a continued banquet, and fertilize the earth which will have you give before you receive. Thus they will ultimately spring up in new and beautiful shapes. Clung to with constancy, they stain your knife and napkin, impart a bad odor to your dining-room, and degenerate into something that is neither pleasant to the eye nor good for food. I believe in a rotation of crops, morally and socially, as well as agriculturally. When you have taken the measure of a man, when you have sounded him and know that you cannot wade in him more than ankle-deep, when you have got out of him all that he has to yield for your soul’s sustenance and strength, what is the next thing to be done? Obviously, pass him on; and turn you “to fresh woods and pastures new.” Do you work him an injury? By no means. Friends that are simply glued on, and don’t grow out of, are little worth. He has nothing more for you, nor you for him; but he may be rich in juices wherewithal to nourish the heart of another man, and their two lives, set together, may have an endosmose and exosmose whose result shall be richness of soil, grandeur of growth, beauty of foliage, and perfectness of fruit; while you and he would only have languished into aridity and a stunted crab-tree.
For my part, I desire to sweep off my old friends with the old year and begin the new with a clean record. It is a measure absolutely necessary. The snake does not put on his new skin over the old one. He sloughs off the first, before he dons the second. He would be a very clumsy serpent, if he did not. One cannot have successive layers of friendships any more than the snake has successive layers of skins. One must adopt some system to guard against a congestion of the heart from plethora of loves. I go in for the much-abused fair-weather, skin-deep, April-shower friends,–the friends who will drop off, if let alone,–who must be kept awake to be kept at all,–who will talk and laugh with you as long as it suits your respective humors and you are prosperous and happy,–the blessed butterfly-race who flutter about your June mornings, and when the clouds lower, and the drops patter, and the rains descend, and the winds blow, will spread their gay wings and float gracefully away to sunny southern lands where the skies are yet blue and the breezes violet-scented. They are not only agreeable, but deeply wise. So long as a man keeps his streamer flying, his sails set, and his hull above water, it is pleasant to paddle alongside; but when the sails split, the yards crack, and the keel goes staggering down, by all means paddle off. Why should you be submerged in his whirlpool? Will he drown any more easily because you are drowning with him? Lung is lung. He dies from want of air, not from want of sympathy. When, a poor fellow sits down among the ashes, the best thing his friends can do is to stand afar off. Job bore the loss of property, children, health, with equanimity. Satan himself found his match there; and for all his buffetings, Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly. But Job’s three friends must needs make an appointment together to come and mourn with him and to comfort him, and after this Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day,–and no wonder.
Your friends have an intimate knowledge of you that is astonishing to contemplate. It is not that they know your affairs, which he who runs may read, but they know you. From a bit of bone, Cuvier could predicate a whole animal, even to the hide and hair. Such moral naturalists are your dear five hundred friends. It seems to yourself that you are immeasurably reticent. You know, of a certainty, that you project only the smallest possible fragment of yourself. You yield your universality to the bond of common brotherhood; but your individualism–what it is that makes you you–withdraws itself naturally, involuntarily, inevitably, into the background,–the dim distance which their eyes cannot penetrate. But, from the fraction which you do project, they construct another you, call it by your name, and pass it around for the real, the actual you. You bristle with jest and laughter and wild whims, to keep them at a distance; and they fancy this to be your every-day equipment. They think your life holds constant carnival. It is astonishing what ideas spring up in the heads of sensible people. There are those who assume that a person can never have had any grief, unless somebody has died, or he has been disappointed in love,–not knowing that every avenue of joy lies open to the tramp of pain. They see the flashing coronet on the queen’s brow, and they infer a diamond woman, not recking of the human heart that throbs wildly out of sight. They see the foam-crest on the wave, and picture an Atlantic Ocean of froth, and not the solemn sea that stands below in eternal equipoise. You turn to them the luminous crescent of your life, and they call it the whole round globe; and so they love you with a love that is agate, not pearl, because what they love in you is something infinitely below the highest. They love you level: they have never scaled your heights nor fathomed your depths. And when they talk of you as familiarly as if they had taken out your auricles and ventricles, and turned them inside out, and wrung them, and shaken them,–when they prate of your transparency and openness, the abandonment with which you draw aside the curtain and reveal the inmost thoughts of your heart,–you, who are to yourself a miracle and a mystery, you smile inwardly, and are content. They are on the wrong scent, and you may pursue your plans in peace. They are indiscriminate and satisfied. They do not know the relation of what appears to what is. If they chance to skirt along the coasts of your Purple Island, it will be only chance, and they will not know it. You may close your port-holes, lower your draw-bridge, and make merry, for they will never come within gun-shot of the “Round Tower of your heart.”
There is no such thing as knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every other. Whether it dwell in the Garden of Eden or the Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and unknown, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise up, with strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that circle our own hearth-stone. Day after day, and year after year, a person moves by your side; he sits at the same table; he reads the same books; he kneels in the same church. You know every hair of his head, every trick of his lips, every tone of his voice; you can tell him far off by his gait. Without seeing him, you recognize his step, his knock, his laugh. “Know him? Yes, I have known him these twenty years.” No, you don’t know him. You know his gait, and hair, and voice. You know what preacher he hears, what ticket he voted, and what were his last year’s expenses; but you don’t know him. He sits quietly in his chair, but he is in the temple. You speak to him; his soul comes out into the vestibule to answer you, and returns,–and the gates are shut; therein you cannot enter. You were discussing the state of the country; but, when you ceased, he opened a postern-gate, went down a bank, and launched on a sea over whose waters you have no boat to sail, no star to guide. You have loved and reverenced him. He has been your concrete of truth and nobleness. Unwittingly you touch a secret spring, and a Blue-Beard Chamber stands revealed. You give no sign; you meet and part as usual; but a Dead Sea rolls between you two forevermore.
It must be so. Not even to the nearest and dearest can one unveil the secret place where his soul abideth, so that there shall be no more any winding ways or hidden chambers; but to your indifferent neighbor, what blind alleys, and deep caverns, and inaccessible mountains! To him who “touches the electric chain wherewith you’re darkly bound,” your soul sends back an answering thrill. Our little window is opened, and there is short parley. Your ships speak each other now and then in welcome, though imperfect communication; but immediately you strike out again into the great, shoreless sea, over which you must sail forever alone. You may shrink from the far-reaching solitudes of your heart, but no other foot than yours can tread them, save those
“That, eighteen hundred years ago, were nailed, For our advantage, to the bitter cross.”
Be thankful that it is so,–that only His eye sees whose hand formed. If we could look in, we should be appalled at the vision. The worlds that glide around us are mysteries too high for us. We cannot attain to them. The naked soul is a sight too awful for man to look at and live. There are individuals whose topography we would like to know a little better, and there is danger that we crash against each other while roaming around in the dark; but, for all that, would we not have the Constitution broken up. Somebody says, “In heaven there will be no secrets,” which, it seems to me, would be intolerable. (If that were a revelation from the King of Heaven, of course I would not speak flippantly of it; but, though towards Heaven we look with reverence and humble hope, I do not know that Tom, Dick, and Harry’s notions of it have any special claim to our respect.) Such publicity would destroy all individuality, and undermine the foundations of society. Clairvoyance–if there be any such thing–always seemed to me a stupid impertinence. When people pay visits to me, I wish them to come to the front-door, and ring the bell, and send up their names. I don’t wish them to climb in at the window, or creep through the pantry, or, worst of all, float through the keyhole, and catch me in undress. So I believe that in all worlds thoughts will be the subjects of volition,–more accurately expressed when expression is desired, but just as entirely suppressed when we will suppression.
After all, perhaps the chief trouble arises from a prevalent confusion of ideas as to what constitutes a man your friend. Friendship may stand for that peaceful complacence which you feel towards all well–behaved people who wear clean collars and use tolerable grammar. This is a very good meaning, if everybody will subscribe to it. But sundry of these well-behaved people will mistake your civility and complacence for a recognition of special affinity, and proceed at once to frame an alliance offensive and defensive while the sun and the moon shall endure. Oh, the barnacles that cling to your keel in such waters! The inevitable result is, that they win your intense rancor. You would feel a genial kindliness towards them, if they would be satisfied with that; but they lay out to be your specialty. They infer your innocent little inch to be the standard-bearer of twenty ells, and goad you to frenzy. I mean you, you desperate little horror, who nearly dethroned my reason six years ago! I always meant to have my revenge, and here I impale you before the public. For three months, you fastened yourself upon me; and I could not shake you off. What availed it me, that you were an honest and excellent man? Did I not, twenty times a day, wish you had been a villain, who had insulted me, and I a Kentucky giant, that I might have the unspeakable satisfaction of knocking you down? But you added to your crimes virtue. Villany had no part or lot in you. You were a member of a church, in good and regular standing; you had graduated with all the honors worth mentioning; you had not a sin, a vice, or a fault that I knew of; and you were so thoroughly good and repulsive that you were a great grief to me. Do you think, you dear, disinterested wretch, that I have forgotten how you were continually putting yourself to horrible inconveniences on my account? Do you think I am not now filled with remorse for the aversion that rooted itself ineradicably in my soul, and which now gloats over you, as you stand in the pillory where my own hands have fastened you? But can Nature be crushed forever? Did I not ruin my nerves, and seriously injure my temper, by the overpowering pressure I laid upon them to keep them quiet when you were by? Could I not, by the sense of coming ill through all my quivering frame, presage your advent as exactly as the barometer heralds the approaching storm? Those three months of agony are little atoned for by this late vengeance: but go in peace!
Mysterious are the ways of friendship. It is not a matter of reason or of choice, but of magnetisms. You cannot always give the premises nor the argument, but the conclusion is a palpable and stubborn fact. Abana and Pharpar may be broad, and deep, and blue, and grand; but only in Jordan shall your soul wash and be clean. A thousand brooks are born of the sunshine and the mountains: very, very few are they whose flow can mingle with yours, and not disturb, but only deepen and broaden the current.
Your friend! Who shall describe him, or worthily paint what he is to you? No merchant, nor lawyer, nor farmer, nor statesman claims your suffrage, but a kingly soul. He comes to you from God,–a prophet, a seer, a revealer. He has a clear vision. His love is reverence. He goes into the _penetralia_ of your life,–not presumptuously, but with uncovered head, unsandalled feet, and pours libations at the innermost shrine. His incense is grateful. For him the sunlight brightens, the skies grow rosy, and all the days are Junes. Wrapped in his love, you float in a delicious rest, rocked in the bosom of purple, scented waves. Nameless melodies sing themselves through your heart. A golden glow suffuses your atmosphere. A vague, fine ecstasy thrills to the sources of life, and earth lays hold on heaven. Such friendship is worship. It elevates the most trifling services into rites. The humblest offices are sanctified. All things are baptized into a new name. Duty is lost in joy. Care veils itself in caresses. Drudgery becomes delight. There is no longer anything menial, small, or servile. All is transformed
“Into something rich and strange.”
The homely household-ways lead through beds of spices and orchards of pomegranates. The daily toil among your parsnips and carrots is plucking May violets with the dew upon them to meet the eyes you love upon their first awaking. In the burden and heat of the day you hear the rustling of summer showers and the whispering of summer winds. Everything is lifted up from the plane of labor to the plane of love, and a glory spans your life. With your friend, speech and silence are one,–for a communion mysterious and intangible reaches across from heart to heart. The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though independent of language, gives to it life and light. The mystic spirit stirs even in commonplaces, and the merest question is an endearment. You are quiet because your heart is over-full. You talk because it is pleasant, not because you have anything to say. You weary of terms that are already love-laden, and you go out into the highways and hedges, and gather up the rough, wild, wilful words, heavy with the hatreds of men, and fill them to the brim with honey-dew. All things great and small, grand or humble, you press into your service, force them to do soldier’s duty, and your banner over them is love.
With such a friendship, presence alone is happiness; nor is absence wholly void,–for memories, and hopes, and pleasing fancies sparkle through the hours, and you know the sunshine will come back.
For such friendship one is grateful. No matter that it comes unsought, and comes not for the seeking. You do not discuss the reasonableness of your gratitude. You only know that your whole being bows with humility and utter thankfulness to him who thus crowns you monarch of all realms.
And the kingdom is everlasting. A thin, pale love dies weakly with the occasion that gave it birth; but such friendship is born of the gods, and is immortal. Clouds and darkness may sweep around it, but within the cloud the glory lives undimmed. Death has no power over it. Time cannot diminish, nor even dishonor annul it. Its direction may have been unworthy, but itself is eternal. You go back into your solitudes: all is silent as aforetime, but you cannot forget that a Voice once resounded there. A Presence filled the valleys and gilded the mountain-tops, –breathed upon the plains, and they sprang up in lilies and roses,–flashed upon the waters, and they flowed to spheral melody,–swept through the forests, and they, too, trembled into song. And though now the warmth has faded out, though the ruddy tints and amber clearness have paled to ashen hues, though the murmuring melodies are dead, and forest, vale, and hill look hard and angular in the sharp air, you know that it is not death. The fire is unquenched beneath. You go your way not disconsolate. There needs but the Victorious Voice. At the touch of the Prince’s lips, life shall rise again and be perfected forevermore.
THE LIFE OF BIRDS.
When one thinks of a bird, one fancies a soft, swift, aimless, joyous thing, full of nervous energy and arrowy motions,–a song with wings. So remote from ours their mode of existence, they seem accidental exiles from an unknown globe, banished where none can understand their language; and men only stare at their darting, inexplicable ways, as at the gyrations of the circus. Watch their little traits for hours, and it only tantalizes curiosity. Every man’s secret is penetrable, if his neighbor be sharp-sighted. Dickens, for instance, can take a poor condemned wretch, like Fagin, whose emotions neither he nor his reader has experienced, and can paint him in colors that seem made of the soul’s own atoms, so that each beholder feels as if he, personally, had been the man. But this bird that hovers and alights beside me, peers up at me, takes its food, then looks again, attitudinizing, jerking, flirting its tail, with a thousand inquisitive and fantastic motions,–although I have power to grasp it in my hand and crush its life out, yet I cannot gain its secret thus, and the centre of its consciousness is really farther from mine than the remotest planetary orbit. “We do not steadily bear in mind,” says Darwin, with a noble scientific humility, “how profoundly ignorant we are of the condition of existence of every animal.”
What “sympathetic penetration” can fathom the life, for instance, of yonder mysterious, almost voiceless, Humming-Bird, smallest of feathery things, and loneliest, whirring among birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen? An image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pigmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds? It is strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant atom perched disconsolately near it, upon some mossy twig; it is like visiting Cinderella among her ashes. And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the daily existence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery.
Pythagoras has been charged, both before and since the days of Malvolio, with holding that “the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a fowl,”–that delinquent men must revisit earth as women, and delinquent women as birds. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, and in no way approved his opinion; but I remember that Harriet Rohan, in her school-days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. “When I saw the Oriole,” she wrote to me, “from his nest among the plum-trees in the garden, sail over the air and high above the Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flashing light, or watched him swinging silently on pendent twigs, I did not dream how near akin we were. Or when a Humming-Bird, a winged drop of gorgeous sheen and gloss, a living gem, poising on his wings, thrust his dark, slender, honey-seeking bill into the white blossoms of a little bush beside my window, I should have thought it no such bad thing to be a bird, even if one next became a bat, like the colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy.” Was this weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far primeval time? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at nightfall, that he is one still? I wonder whether he can enjoy the winged brotherhood into which he has thrust himself,–victim, perhaps, of some rash quadruped-ambition,–an Icarus doomed forever _not_ to fall.
I think, that, if required, on pain of death, to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg. There is, first, its exquisite fragility of material, strong only by the mathematical precision of that form so daintily moulded. There is its absolute purity from external stain, since that thin barrier remains impassable until the whole is in ruins,–a purity recognized in the household proverb of “An apple, an egg, and a nut.” Then, its range of tints, so varied, so subdued, and so beautiful,–whether of pure white, like the Martin’s, or pure green, like the Robin’s, or dotted and mottled into the loveliest of browns, like the Red Thrush’s, or aqua-marine, with stains of moss-agate, like the Chipping-Sparrow’s, or blotched with long weird ink-marks on a pale ground, like the Oriole’s, as if it bore inscribed some magic clue to the bird’s darting flight and pensile nest. Above all, the associations and predictions of this little wonder,–that one may bear home between his fingers all that winged splendor, all that celestial melody, coiled in mystery within these tiny walls! Even the chrysalis is less amazing, for its form always preserves some trace, however fantastic, of the perfect insect, and it is but moulting a skin; but this egg appears to the eye like a separate unit from some other kingdom of Nature, claiming more kindred with the very stones than with feathery existence; and it is as if a pearl opened and an angel sang.
The nest which is to contain these fair things is a wondrous study also, from the coarse masonry of the Robin to the soft structure of the Humming-Bird, a baby-house among nests. Among all created things, the birds come nearest to man in their domesticity. Their unions are usually in pairs, and for life; and with them, unlike the practice of most quadrupeds, the male labors for the young. He chooses the locality of the nest, aids in its construction, and fights for it, if needful. He sometimes assists in hatching the eggs. He feeds the brood with exhausting labor, like yonder Robin, whose winged picturesque day is spent in putting worms into insatiable beaks, at the rate of one morsel in every three minutes. He has to teach them to fly, as among the Swallows, or even to hunt, as among the Hawks. His life is anchored to his home. Yonder Oriole fills with light and melody the thousand branches of a neighborhood; and yet the centre for all this divergent splendor is always that one drooping dome upon one chosen tree. This he helped to build in May, confiscating cotton as if he were a Union provost-martial, and singing many songs, with his mouth full of plunder; and there he watches over his household, all through the leafy June, perched often upon the airy cradle-edge, and swaying with it in the summer wind. And from this deep nest, after the pretty eggs are hatched, will he and his mate extract every fragment of the shell, leaving it, like all other nests, save those of birds of prey, clean and pure, when the young are flown. This they do chiefly from an instinct of delicacy; since wood-birds are not wont to use the same nest a second time, even if they rear several broods in a season.
The subdued tints and notes which almost always mark the female sex, among birds,–unlike insects and human beings, of which the female is often more showy than the male,–seem designed to secure their safety while sitting on the nest, while the brighter colors and louder song of the male enable his domestic circle to detect his whereabouts more easily. It is commonly noticed, in the same way, that ground-birds have more neutral tints than those which build out of reach. With the aid of these advantages, it is astonishing how well these roving creatures keep their secrets, and what sharp eyes are needed to spy out their habitations,–while it always seems as if the empty last-year’s nests were very plenty. Some, indeed, are very elaborately concealed, as of the Golden-Crowned Thrush, called, for this reason, the Oven-Bird,–the Meadow-Lark, with its burrowed gallery among the grass,–and the Kingfisher, which mines four feet into the earth. But most of the rarer nests would hardly be discovered, only that the maternal instinct seems sometimes so overloaded by Nature as to defeat itself, and the bird flies and chirps in agony, when she might pass unnoticed by keeping still. The most marked exception which I have noticed is the Red Thrush, which, in this respect, as in others, has the most high-bred manners among all our birds: both male and female sometimes flit in perfect silence through the bushes, and show solicitude only in a sob which is scarcely audible.
Passing along the shore-path by our lake, one day in June, I heard a great sound of scuffling and yelping before me, as if dogs were hunting rabbits or woodchucks. On approaching, I saw no sign of such disturbances, and presently a Partridge came running at me through the trees, with ruff and tail expanded, bill wide open, and hissing like a Goose,–then turned suddenly, and with ruff and tail furled, but with no pretence of lameness, scudded off through the woods in a circle,–then at me again fiercely, approaching within two yards, and spreading all her furbelows, to intimidate, as before,–then, taking in sail, went off again, always at the same rate of speed, yelping like an angry squirrel, squealing like a pig, occasionally clucking like a hen, and, in general, so filling the woods with bustle and disturbance that there seemed no room for anything else. Quite overawed by the display, I stood watching her for some time, then entered the underbrush, where the little invisible brood had been unceasingly piping, in their baby way. So motionless were they, that, for all their noise, I stood with my feet among them, for some minutes, without finding it possible to detect them. When found and taken from the ground, which they so closely resembled, they made no attempt to escape; but, when replaced, they presently ran away fast, as if conscious that the first policy had failed, and that their mother had retreated. Such is the summer-life of these little things; but come again in the fall, when the wild autumnal winds go marching through the woods, and a dozen pairs of strong wings will thrill like thunder through the arches of the trees, as the full-grown brood whirrs away around you.
Not only have we scarcely any species of birds which are thoroughly and unquestionably identical with European species, but there are certain general variations of habit. For instance, in regard to migration. This is, of course, a Universal instinct, since even tropical birds migrate for short distances from the equator, so essential to their existence do these wanderings seem. But in New England, among birds as among men, the roving habit seems unusually strong, and abodes are shifted very rapidly. The whole number of species observed in Massachusetts is about the same as in England,–some three hundred in all. But of this number, in England, about a hundred habitually winter on the island, and half that number even in the Hebrides, some birds actually breeding in Scotland during January and February, incredible as it may seem. Their habits can, therefore, be observed through a long period of the year; while with us the bright army comes and encamps for a month or two and then vanishes. You must attend their dress-parades, while they last; for you will have but few opportunities, and their domestic life must commonly be studied during a few weeks of the season, or not at all.
Wonderful as the instinct of migration seems, it is not, perhaps, so altogether amazing in itself as in some of its attendant details. To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from its fading, south; they must keep near the food on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests; the Song-Sparrow seeks the ground; the Blue-Bird finds a box or a hole somewhere; the Red-Wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in spring than at any other season; and even the sociable Robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same Cat-Bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree,–that is the thing astonishing to me. In England, a lame Redstart was observed in the same garden for sixteen successive years; and the astonishing precision of course which enables some birds of small size to fly from Australia to New Zealand in a day–probably the longest single flight ever taken–is only a part of the same mysterious instinct of direction.
In comparing modes of flight, the most surprising, of course, is that of the Swallow tribe, remarkable not merely for its velocity, but for the amazing boldness and instantaneousness of the angles it makes; so that eminent European mechanicians have speculated in vain upon the methods used in its locomotion, and prizes have been offered, by mechanical exhibitions, to him who could best explain it. With impetuous dash, they sweep through our perilous streets, these wild hunters of the air, “so near, and yet so far”; they bathe flying, and flying they feed their young. In my immediate vicinity, the Chimney-Swallow is not now common, nor the Sand-Swallow; but the Cliff-Swallow, that strange emigrant from the Far West, the Barn-Swallow, and the white-breasted species, are abundant, together with the Purple Martin. I know no prettier sight than a bevy of these bright little creatures, met from a dozen different farm-houses to picnic at a way-side pool, splashing and fluttering, with their long wings expanded like butterflies, keeping poised by a constant hovering motion, just tilting upon their feet, which scarcely touch the moist ground. You will seldom see them actually perch on anything less airy than some telegraphic wire; but, when they do alight, each will make chatter enough for a dozen, as if all the rushing hurry of the wings had passed into the tongue.
Between the swiftness of the Swallow and the stateliness of the birds of prey, the whole range of bird-motion seems included. The long wave of a Hawk’s wings seems almost to send a slow vibration through the atmosphere, tolling upon the eye as yon distant bell upon the ear. I never was more impressed with the superior dignity of these soarings than in observing a bloodless contest in the air, last April. Standing beside a little grove, on a rocky hill-side, I heard Crows cawing near by, and then a sound like great flies buzzing, which I really attributed, for a moment, to some early insect. Turning, I saw two Crows flapping their heavy wings among the trees, and observed that they were teasing a Hawk about as large as themselves, which was also on the wing. Presently all three had risen above the branches, and were circling higher and higher in a slow spiral. The Crows kept constantly swooping at their enemy, with the same angry buzz, one of the two taking decidedly the lead. They seldom struck at him with their beaks, but kept lumbering against him, and flapping him with their wings, as if in a fruitless effort to capsize him; while the Hawk kept carelessly eluding the assaults, now inclining on one side, now on the other, with a stately grace, never retaliating, but seeming rather to enjoy the novel amusement, as if it were a skirmish in balloons. During all this, indeed, he scarcely seemed once to wave his wings; yet he soared steadily aloft, till the Crows refused to follow, though already higher than I ever saw Crows before, dim against the fleecy sky; then the Hawk flew northward, but soon after he sailed over us once again, with loud, scornful _chirr_, and they only cawed, and left him undisturbed.
When we hear the tumult of music from these various artists of the air, it seems as if the symphony never could be analyzed into its different instruments. But with time and patience it is not so difficult; nor can we really enjoy the performance, so long as it is only a confused chorus to our ears. It is not merely the highest form of animal language, but, in strictness of etymology, the only form, if it be true, as is claimed, that no other animal employs its tongue, _lingua_, in producing sound. In the Middle Ages, the song of birds was called their Latin, as was any other foreign dialect. It was the old German superstition, that any one who should eat the heart of a bird would thenceforth comprehend its language; and one modern philologist of the same nation (Masius declares) has so far studied the sounds produced by domestic fowls as to announce a Goose-Lexicon. Dupont de Nemours asserted that he understood eleven words of the Pigeon language, the same number of that of Fowls, fourteen of the Cat tongue, twenty-two of that of Cattle, thirty of that of Dogs, and the Raven language he understood completely. But the ordinary observer seldom attains farther than to comprehend some of the cries of anxiety and fear around him, often so unlike the accustomed carol of the bird,–as the mew of the Cat-Bird, the lamb-like bleating of the Veery and his impatient _yeoick_, the _chaip_ of the Meadow-Lark, the _towyee_ of the Chewink, the petulant _psit_ and _tsee_ of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and the hoarse cooing of the Bobolink. And with some of our most familiar birds the variety of notes is so great as really to promise difficulties in the American department of the bird-lexicon. I have watched two Song-Sparrows, perched near each other, in whom the spy-glass could show not the slightest difference of marking, even in the characteristic stains upon the breast, who yet chanted to each other, for fifteen minutes, over and over, two elaborate songs which had nothing in common. I have observed a similar thing in two Wood-Sparrows, with their sweet, distinct, accelerating lay; nor can I find it stated that the difference is sexual. Who can claim to have heard the whole song of the Robin? Taking shelter from a shower beneath an oak-tree, the other day, I caught a few of the notes which one of those cheery creatures, who love to sing in wet weather, tossed down to me through the drops.
(Before noticing me,) _chirrup, cheerup_ (pausing in alarm, at my approach,) _che, che, che;_ (broken presently by a thoughtful strain,) _caw, caw,_ (then softer and more confiding,) _see, see, see;_ (then the original note, in a whisper,) _chirrup, cheerup;_ (often broken by a soft note,) _see, wee;_ (and an odder one,) _squeal;_ (and a mellow note,) _tweedle._
And all these were mingled with more complex combinations, and with half-imitations, as of the Blue-Bird, so that it seemed almost impossible to doubt that there was some specific meaning, to him and his peers, in this endless vocabulary. Yet other birds, as quick-witted as the Robins, possess but one or two chirping notes, to which they seem unable to give more than the very rudest variation of accent.
The controversy between the singing-birds of Europe and America has had various phases and influential disputants. Buffon easily convinced himself that our Thrushes had no songs, because the voices of all birds grew harsh in savage countries, such as he naturally held this continent to be. Audubon, on the other hand, relates that even in his childhood he was assured by his father that the American songsters were the best, though neither Americans nor Europeans could be convinced of it. MacGillivray, the Scottish naturalist, reports that Audubon himself, in conversation, arranged our vocalists in the following order:–first, the Mocking-Bird, as unrivalled; then, the Wood-Thrush, Cat-Bird, and Red Thrush; the Rose-Breasted, Pine, and Blue Grosbeak; the Orchard and Golden Oriole; the Tawny and Hermit Thrushes; several Finches, –Bachmann’s, the White-Crowned, the Indigo, and the Nonpareil; and finally, the Bobolink.
Among those birds of this list which frequent Massachusetts, Audubon might well put the Wood-Thrush at the head. As I sat the other day in the deep woods beside a black brook which dropped from stone to stone beneath the shadow of our Rattlesnake Rocks, the air seemed at first as silent above me as the earth below. The buzz of summer sounds had not begun. Sometimes a bee hummed by with a long swift thrill like a chord of music; sometimes a breeze came resounding up the forest like an approaching locomotive, and then died utterly away. Then, at length, a Veery’s delicious note rose in a fountain of liquid melody from beneath me; and when it was ended, the clear, calm, interrupted chant of the Wood-Thrush fell like solemn water-drops from some source above–I am acquainted with no sound in Nature so sweet, so elevated, so serene. Flutes and flageolets are Art’s poor efforts to recall that softer sound. It is simple, and seems all prelude; but the music to which it is the overture must belong to other spheres. It might be the _Angelus_ of some lost convent. It might be the meditation of some maiden-hermit, saying over to herself in solitude, with recurrent tuneful pauses, the only song she knows. Beside this soliloquy of seraphs, the carol of the Veery seems a familiar and almost domestic thing; yet it is so charming that Audubon must have designed to include it among the Thrushes whose merits he proclaims.
But the range of musical perfection is a wide one; and if the standard of excellence be that wondrous brilliancy and variety of execution suggested by the Mocking-Bird, then the palm belongs, among our New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking-Bird sing at liberty; and while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our Mavis, while his stately attitudes and high-born bearing are in full harmony with the song. I recall the steep, bare hill-side, and the two great boulders which guard the lonely grove, where I first fully learned the wonder of this lay, as if I had met Saint Cecilia there. A thoroughly happy song, overflowing with life, it gives even its most familiar phrases an air of gracious condescension, as when some great violinist stoops to the “Carnival of Venice.” The Red Thrush does not, however, consent to any parrot-like mimicry, though every note of wood or field–Oriole, Bobolink, Crow, Jay, Robin, Whippoorwill–appears to pass in veiled procession through the song.
Retain the execution of the Red Thrush, but hopelessly impair his organ, and you have the Cat-Bird. This accustomed visitor would seem a gifted vocalist, but for the inevitable comparison between his thinner note and the gushing melodies of the lordlier bird. Is it some hopeless consciousness of this disadvantage which leads him to pursue that peculiar habit of singing softly to himself very often, in a fancied seclusion? When other birds are cheerily out-of-doors, on some bright morning of May or June, one will often discover a solitary Cat-Bird sitting concealed in the middle of a dense bush, and twittering busily, in subdued rehearsal, the whole copious variety of his lay, practising trills and preparing half-imitations, which, at some other time, sitting on the topmost twig, he shall hilariously seem to improvise before all the world. Can it be that he is really in some slight disgrace with Nature, with that demi-mourning garb of his,–and that his feline cry of terror, which makes his opprobrium with boys, is part of some hidden doom decreed? No, the lovely color of the eggs which his companion watches on that laboriously builded staging of twigs shall vindicate this familiar companion from any suspicion of original sin. Indeed, it is well demonstrated by our American ooelogist, Dr. Brewer, that the eggs of the Cat-Bird affiliate him with the Robin and the Wood-Thrush, all three being widely separated in this respect from the Red Thrush. The Red Thrush builds on the ground, and has mottled eggs; while the whole household establishment of the Wood-Thrush is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Robin, and the Cat-Bird differs chiefly in being more of a carpenter and less of a mason.
The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, which Audubon places so high on his list of minstrels, comes annually to one region in this vicinity, but I am not sure of having heard it. The young Pine Grosbeaks come to our woods in winter, and have then but a subdued twitter. Every one knows the Bobolink; and almost all recognize the Oriole, by sight at least, even if unfamiliar with all the notes of his cheery and resounding song. The Red-Eyed Flycatcher, heard even more constantly, is less generally identified by name; but his note sounds all day among the elms of our streets, and seems a sort of piano-adaptation, popularized for the million, of the rich notes of the Thrushes. He is not mentioned by Audubon among his favorites, and has no right to complain of the exclusion. Yet the birds which most endear summer are not necessarily the finest performers; and certainly there is none whose note I could spare less easily than the little Chipping-Sparrow, called hereabouts the Hair-Bird. To lie half-awake on a warm morning in June, and hear that soft insect-like chirp draw in and out with long melodious pulsations, like the rising and falling of the human breath, condenses for my ear the whole luxury of summer. Later in the day, among the multiplicity of noises, the chirping becomes louder and more detached, losing that faint and dream-like thrill.
The bird-notes which have the most familiar fascination are perhaps simply those most intimately associated with other rural things. This applies especially to the earliest spring songsters. Listening to these delicious prophets upon some of those still and moist days which slip in between the rough winds of March and fill our lives for a moment with anticipated delights, it has seemed to me that their varied notes were sent to symbolize all the different elements of spring association. The Blue-Bird seems to represent simply spring’s faint, tremulous, liquid sweetness, the Song-Sparrow its changing pulsations of more positive and varied joy, and the Robin its cheery and superabundant vitality. The later birds of the season, suggesting no such fine-drawn sensations, yet identify themselves with their chosen haunts, so that we cannot think of the one without the other. In the meadows, we hear the languid and tender drawl of the Meadow-Lark,–one of the most peculiar of notes, almost amounting to affectation in its excess of laborious sweetness. When we reach the thickets and wooded streams, there is no affectation in the Maryland Yellow-Throat, that little restless busybody, with his eternal _which-is-it, which-is-it, which-is-it_, emphasizing each syllable at will, in despair of response. Passing into the loftier woods, we find them resounding with the loud proclamation of the Golden-Crowned Thrush,–_scheat, scheat, scheat, scheat_,–rising and growing louder in a vigorous way that rather suggests some great Woodpecker than such a tiny thing. And penetrating to some yet lonelier place, we find it consecrated to that life-long sorrow, whatever it may be, which is made immortal in the plaintive cadence of the Pewee.
There is one favorite bird,–the Chewink, or Ground-Robin,–which, I always fancied, must have been known to Keats when he wrote those few words of perfect descriptiveness,–
“If an innocent bird
Before my heedless footsteps _stirred and stirred __In little journeys_.”
What restless spirit is in this creature, that, while so shy in its own personal habits, it yet watches every visitor with a Paul-Pry curiosity, follows him in the woods, peers out among the underbrush, scratches upon the leaves with a pretty pretence of important business there, and presently, when disregarded, ascends some small tree and begins to carol its monotonous song, as if there were no such thing as man in the universe? There is something irregular and fantastic in the coloring, also, of the Chewink: unlike the generality of ground-birds, it is a showy thing, with black, white, and bay intermingled, and it is one of the most unmistakable of all our feathery creatures, in its aspect and its ways.
Another of my favorites, perhaps from our sympathy as to localities, since we meet freely every summer at a favorite lake, is the King-Bird or Tyrant-Flycatcher. The habits of royalty or tyranny I have never been able to perceive,–only a democratic habit of resistance to tyrants; but this bird always impresses me as a perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered person, who amid a very talkative society prefers to listen, and shows his character by action only. So long as he sits silently on some stake or bush in the neighborhood of his family-circle, you notice only his glossy black cap and the white feathers in his handsome tail; but let a Hawk or a Crow come near, and you find that he is something more than a mere lazy listener to the Bobolink: far up in the air, determined to be thorough in his chastisements, you will see him, with a comrade or two, driving the bulky intruder away into the distance, till you wonder how he ever expects to find his own way back again. He speaks with emphasis, on these occasions, and then reverts, more sedately than ever, to his accustomed silence.
After all the great labors of Audubon and Wilson, it is certain that the recent visible progress of American ornithology has by no means equalled that of several other departments of Natural History. The older books are now out of print, and there is actually no popular treatise on the subject to be had: a destitution singularly contrasted with the variety of excellent botanical works which the last twenty years have produced. Nuttall’s fascinating volumes, and Brewer’s edition of Wilson, are equally inaccessible; and the most valuable contributions since their time, so far as I know, are that portion of Dr. Brewer’s work on eggs printed in the eleventh volume of the “Smithsonian Contributions,” and four admirable articles in this very magazine.[14] But the most important observations are locked up in the desks or exhibited in the cabinets of private observers, who have little opportunity of comparing facts with other students, or with reliable printed authorities. What do we know, for instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau, last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes. The Hawk most common at Concord, the Red-Tailed species, is not known near the sea-shore, twenty miles off,–as at Boston or Plymouth. The White-Breasted Sparrow is rare in Concord; but the Ashburnham woods, thirty miles away, are full of it. The Scarlet Tanager’s is the commonest note in Concord, except the Red-Eyed Flycatcher’s; yet one of the best field-ornithologists in Boston had never heard it. The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak is seen not infrequently at Concord, though its nest is rarely found; but in Minnesota Thoreau found it more abundant than any other bird, far more so than the Robin. But his most interesting statement, to my fancy, was, that, during a stay of ten weeks on Monadnock, he found that the Snow-Bird built its nest on the top of the mountain, and probably never came down through the season. That was its Arctic; and it would probably yet be found, he predicted, on Wachusett and other Massachusetts peaks. It is known that the Snow-Bird, or “Snow-Flake,” as it is called in England, was reported by Audubon as having only once been proved to build in the United States, namely, among the White Mountains, though Wilson found its nests among the Alleghanies; and in New England it used to be the rural belief that the Snow-Bird and the Chipping-Sparrow were the same.
After July, most of our birds grow silent, and, but for the insects, August would be almost the stillest month in the year,–stiller than the winter, when the woods are often vocal with the Crow, the Jay, and the Chickadee. But with patient attention one may hear, even far into the autumn, the accustomed notes. As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake, with the low sunlight striking almost level across the wooded banks, it seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer’s sweetness were being poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles rustled beside the brink and slid into the water,–cows plashed in the shallows,–fishes leaped from the placid depths,–a squirrel sobbed and fretted on a neighboring stump,–a katydid across the lake maintained its hard, dry croak,–the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with little fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done,–the grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they would take no more part in the symphony of the year. Then, as if by preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; Jays screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle of water from a bottle; a Kingfisher wound his rattle, more briefly than in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to suffice; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great rude splash, and then flew heavily away; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage; and, at last, a Loon laughed loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with Katahdin Lake and Amperzand.
But the later the birds linger in the autumn, the more their aspect differs from that of spring. In spring, they come, jubilant, noisy, triumphant, from the South, the winter conquered and the long journey done. In autumn, they come timidly from the North, and, pausing on their anxious retreat, lurk within the fading copses and twitter snatches of song as fading. Others fly as openly as ever, but gather in flocks, as the Robins, most piteous of all birds at this season,–thin, faded, ragged, their bold note sunk to a feeble quaver, and their manner a mere caricature of that inexpressible military smartness with which they held up their heads in May.
Yet I cannot really find anything sad even in November. When I think of the thrilling beauty of the season past, the birds that came and went, the insects that took up the choral song as the birds grew silent, the procession of the flowers, the glory of autumn,–and when I think, that, this also ended, a new gallery of wonder is opening, almost more beautiful, in the magnificence of frost and snow, there comes an impression of affluence and liberality in the universe, which seasons of changeless and uneventful verdure would never give. The catkins already formed on the alder, quite prepared to droop into April’s beauty,–the white edges of the May-flower’s petals, already visible through the bud, show in advance that winter is but a slight and temporary retardation of the life of Nature, and that the barrier which separates November from March is not really more solid than that which parts the sunset from the sunrise.
[Footnote 14: “Our Birds and their Ways” (December, 1857); “The Singing-Birds and their Songs” (August, 1858); “The Birds of the Garden and Orchard” (October, 1858); “The Birds of the Pasture and Forest” (December, 1853);–the first by J. Elliot Cabot, and the three last by Wilson Flagg.]
THE NEW OPPOSITION PARTY.
In the rapid alternations of opinion produced by the varying incidents of the present war, a few days effect the work of centuries. We may therefore be pardoned for giving an antique coloring to an event of recent occurrence. Accordingly we say, once upon a time, (Tuesday, July 1, 1862) a great popular convention of all who loved the Constitution and the Union, and all who hated “niggers,” was called in the city of New York. The place of meeting was the Cooper Institute, and among the signers to the call were prominent business and professional men of that great metropolis. At this meeting, that eminently calm and learned jurist, the Honorable W.A. Duer, interrupted the course of an elaborate argument for the constitutional rights of the Southern rebels by a melodramatic exclamation, that, if we hanged the traitors of the country in the order of their guilt, “the next man who marched upon the scaffold after Jefferson Davis would be Charles Sumner.”
The professed object of the meeting was to form a party devoted to the support of “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.” Its practical effect was to give the Confederates and foreign powers a broad hint that the North was no longer a unit. The coincidence of the meeting with the Federal reverses before Richmond made its professed object all