(lass tl I US Book ,D h S2 % ^i«fiiiit!iii!ii'iifi!i mm " \ j, i J^^ — ^f /^^. " Then you don't prohibit, and you don't practise it?" Young. "My prejudices prevent me." This remnant of an old feeling brought from the Gentile world, and this alone, would seem to prevent the Saints from rushing into the higher forms of incest. How long will these Gentile sentiments remain in force ? " You will find here," said Elder Stenhouse to me, talking on another subject, "polygamists of the third THE DOG TRINE OF PL UBALITIES. 217 generation; when these boys and girls grow up, and marr}', you will have in these valleys the true feeling of patriarchal life. The old world is about us yet ; and we are always thinking of what people may say in the Scottish hills and the Midland shires." A revival of polygamy, which would have been sin- gular in either Persia or Afghanistan, sprang up slowly, and by a sort of secret growth. It began with Rigdon and his theory of the spiritual wife, which he is said to have borrowed from the Vermont Methodists. At first, this theory was no more than a mystical spec- ulation ; having reference, less to the world and its duties, than to heaven and its thrones. We know that it was preached by Rigdon, that it was denounced by Joseph, that it crept into favor with the ciders, that it gave rise to much scandal in the Church, and that it was finally superseded by a more practical and useful creed. The S2:)irit evoked by that fanatic in the infant church could not be laid ; sealing women went on ; the first in the new Prophet's household, afterwards in the harems pf Kimball, Pratt, and Hyde , whose mar- riages, only half secret, put an end to the mystical restraints involved in the theory of spiritual husbands and spiritual wives. They were polygamous, but po- lygamous without disguise. Years afterwards. Young produced a paper, which he said was a true copy of a revelation made to Joseph at Nauvoo, commanding him, after the manner of Abraham, of Jacob, and of David, to receive into his bosom as many wives as should be given unto him of God. This paper was not in Joseph's handwriting, nor in that of Emma, his wife. Young declares that it was written down from the Prophet's lips by a male disciple ; adding, with a true touch of nature, that when Emma had first heard 19 218 NEW A3IERICA. it read, she had seized the paper and flung it on the fire. Young tells me that he was himself opposed to the doctrine, and that he preached against it, foreseehig what trouhle it would bring upon the Church. He says that he shed many bitter tears over the sacred writing ; and that only on his being convinced by Joseph that the command to marry more wives was a true revelation, he submitted his prejudices and his passions to the will of God. He is very emphatic on this point. " Without this revelation on polygamy," he said to us, "we should have lived our religious life, but not so perfectly as we do now. God directed men, through Joseph, to take more wives. This is what we most firmly believe." As he sj^oke, he appealed to the apostles who were sitting round us, every one of whom bowed and acquiesced in these words. For years, the Saints admit that nothing had come of this revelation ; that was kept a secret from the world ; two things having to be seen before such a dogma could be openly proclaimed in the Church ; (first) how it would be received by the great- masses of the Saints at home and abroad ; and (second) how it would be regarded by the American courts of law. To ascertain how it would be welcomed by the Saints, sermons were preached and poetry Avas composed. Female missionaries called on the people to repent of their sins, and to return to the principles of patriarchal life. Every Sarai was encouraged to bring forth her Hagar. A religious glow ran through the Mormon Society, and the whole body of Saints declared for publishing the command from God to Joseph in favor of taking to his bosom a plurality of wives. Two thousand elders came together in the New Jerusalem, and after hearing a discourse from Orson THE DOCTRINE OF PLURALITIES. 219 Pratt, and a speech from Brigham Youno;, they re- ceived and adopted the revelation, (August 29, 1852); a remarkable date in the history of their church, one of the saddest epochs in that of the Saxon race. Nearly all those elders were of English blood; a few only were Germans, Gauls, and Danes ; nineteen in every twenty, at least, were either English or American born. That day the red men and the white men made with each other an unwritten covenant, for the Shoshone had at length found a brother in the Pale-face, and the Pawnee saw the morals of his wigwam carried into the Saxon's ranch. But the new dogma from Heaven was announced by Young as a special and personal, rather than a common and indiscriminate, property of the Saints. The power to take many wives was given to them as a grace, not as a right. Plurality was permitted to a few, not enjoined upon the many. In the eyes of Young, it was regarded, not as a privilege of the earth, but as a gift of heaven ; a peculiar blessing from the Father to some of His most favored sons. The Prophet seems to have noted from the first, that in this passionate and robust society, full of young life and young ideas, his power of giving women to his elders and apostles would be of higher moment to him, as a governing force, than even his power of blessing the earth and unlocking the gates of heaven. Such an authority has made him the master of every house in Utah. N^o Pope, no Caliph, no Gosain, ever exercised this power of gratifying every heart that lusted after beauty ; but when it came into Young's hands, through the march of ideas and events, he held it in his grip, as a faculty inseparable from his person and his rank. A saint may wed one woman without seeking leave from his Prophet ; that 220 NEW AMEBIC A. privilege may be considered one of his rights as a man ; but beyond this limit he can never go, except by permission of his spiritual chief. In every case of taking a second wife, a special warrant is required from heaven, which Young alone has the right to ask. If Young says yea, the marriage may take place ; if he says nay, there is no appeal from his spoken word. In the Mormon church polygamy is not a right of man, but a gift of God. CHAPTER XXX. THE GREAT SCHISM. This dogma of a plurality of wives has not come into the church without fierce disputes and a violent schism. George A. Smith, cousin of Joseph, and Historian of the Mormon Church, tells me from the papers in his office, that about five hundred bishops and elders live in polygamy in the Salt Lake valleys; these five hundred elders having, as he believes, on the average, about four wives each, and probably fifteen children ; so that this very peculiar institution has come, in fourteen years, to aflect the lives and fortunes, more or less, of ten thousand persons. This number, large though it seems, is but a twentieth part of the following claimed by Young. Assuming, then, that these five hundred pluralists are all of the same opinion; — in the first place, as to the divine will having been truly manifested to Joseph ; in the THE GREAT SCHISM. 221 second place, as to that manifestation having been faithfully recorded; and in the third place, as to that record having been loyally preserved, — there must still be room for a very large difference of opinion. The great body of male Saints must always be content with a single wife; Young himself admits so much. Only the rich, the steadfast, the complaisant, can be indulged in the luxury of a harem even now, when the thing is fresh and the number of female converts is large enough to supply the want. As nature itself is fighting against this dogma, the humble Saint cannot hope to enjoy in the future any of the advantages which he is now denied. Man}', even among the wealthy, hesitate, like Captain Hooper, to commit themselves forever to a doubtful rule of family order, and to a certain collision with the United States. Some protest in words, and some recede from the Church, without, however, renouncing the authority of Joseph Smith. The existence of a second Mormon Church — of a great schismatic body, is not denied by Young, who of course considers it the devil's work. Vast bodies of the Saints have left the Church on account of polygamy ; twenty thousand, I am told, have done so, in California alone. Mau}?^ of these non-pluralist Saints exist in Missouri and in Illinois. Even among those who fondly cling to their Church at Salt Lake City, it is apparent to me that nineteen in twenty have no interest, and not much faith, in polygamy. The belief that their founder Joseph never lived in this objectionable state is widely spread. Prophets, bishops, elders, all the great leaders of the faith, assert that for months before his death at Carthage, the founder of Mormonism had indulged himself though in secret, with a household of many 19* 222 NEW AMERICA. wives. Of course tliey do not call his sealing to him- self these women an indulgence ; they say he took to himself such females only as were given to him of God. But they claim him as a pluralist. Now, if this assertion could be proved, the trouble would be ended, since anything that Joseph practised would be held a virtue, a necessity, by his flock. On the other side, a pluralist clergy is bound to maintain the truth of this hypothesis. For if Joseph were not a polyga- mist, he could hardly, they would reason, have been a faithful Mormon and a saint of God; since it is the present belief of their body that a man with only one wife will become a bachelor angel, a mere messenger and servant to the patriarchal gods. So, without pro- ducing much evidence of the fact, the elders have stoutly asserted that Joseph had secretly taken to him- self a multitude of women, three or four of whom they point out to you, as still living at Salt Lake in the family of Brigham Young. Still, no proof has ever yet been adduced to show that Joseph either lived as a polygamist or dictated the revelation in favor of a plurality of wives. That he did not openly live with more than one woman is admitted by all — or by nearly all; and so far as his early and undoubted writings are concerned, nothing can be clearer than that his feelings were opposed to the doctrines and practices which have since his death become the high notes of his church. In the Book of Mormon he makes God* Himself say that He delights in the chastity of women, and that the harems of David and Solomon are abominations in His sight. Elder Godbe, to whom I pointed out this passage, informed me that the bishops explain away this view of polygamy, as being uttered by God at a time when He was angry with His people, on account of their THE GREAT SCHISM. 223 sins, and as not expressing His permanent will on the subject of a holy life. The question of fact is open like the question of infer- ence. Joseph, it is well known, set his face against Rigdon's theory of the spiritual wife ; and it is equally well known that he neither published the revelations which bear his name, nor spoke of such a document as being in his hands. Emma, Joseph's wife and secretary, the partner of all his toils, of all his glories, coolly, firmly, perma- nently denies that her husband ever had any other wife than herself. She declares the story to be false, the revelation a fraud. She denounces polygamy as the invention of Young and Pratt — a work of the devil — brought in by them for the destruction of God's new church. On account of this doctrine, she has separated herself from the Saints of Utah, and has taken up her dwelling with what she calls a remnant of the true church at Nauvoo. The four sons of Joseph — Joseph, William, Alex- ander, David — all deny and denounce what they call Young's imposture of plurality. These sons of Joseph are now grown men ; and their personal interests are so clearly identified with the success of their father's church, to the members of which their fellowship would be precious, that nothing less than a personal conviction of the truth of what they say can be hon- estly considered as having turned them against Brig- ham Young. As it is, these sons of the original seer have formed a great schism in the church. Under the name of Josephites, a band of Mormons are now gathering round these sons of the prophet, strong enough to beard the lion in his den. Alexander Smith has been at Salt Lake while I have been here, and has been 224 NEW AMERICA. suffered to preach asrainst polyo^amy in Independence Hall. Young appears to me very sore on account of these young men, whom he would gladly receive into his family, and adopt as his sons, if they would only let him. David he regards with a peculiar grace and favor. "Before that child was born," he said to me one da}^ when the conversation turned on these young men, "Joseph told me that he would be a son; that his name must be David ; that he would grow up to be the guide and ruler of this church." I asked Young whether he thought this prophecy would come to pass. "Yea," he answered; "in the Lord's own time, David will be called to this work." I asked him whether David was not just now considered to be out of the church. "He will be called and reconciled," said Young, "the moment he feels a desire to be led aright." This schism on account of polygamy — led, as it is, by the Prophet's widow and her sons — is a serious fact for the church, even in the judgment of those bishops and elders who in minor affairs would seem to take no heed for the morrow. Young is alive to it; for in reading the Chicago platform, he can see how easily the Gentile world might reconcile itself to the Prophet's sons in Nauvoo, while waging war upon himself and the supporters of polygamy in Utah. The chief — almost the sole — evidence that we have found in Salt Lake City in favor of Joseph having had several wives in the flesh is an assertion made by Young. I was pointing out to him the loss of moral force to which his people must be always subject while the testimony on that cardinal .point of practice is incom- plete. If Joseph were sealed to many women, there THE GREAT SCHISM. 225 must be records, witnesses, of the fact; where are those records and those witnesses ? "I," said Young, vehemently, "am the witness. I myself sealed dozens of women to Joseph." I asked him whether Emma was aware of it. He said he guessed she was ; but he could not say. In answer to another question, he admitted that Joseph had no issue by any of these wives who were sealed to him in dozens. From two other sources we have obtained particles of evidence confirming Young's assertion. Two wit- nesses, living far apart, unknown to each other, have told us they were intimate with women who assert that they had been sealed to Joseph at Nauvoo. Young assures me that several old ladies, now living under his roof, are widows of Joseph; and that all the apos- tles know them, and reverence them as such. Three of these ladies I have seen in the Tabernacle. I have learned that some of these women have borne children to the second Prophet, though they bore none to the first. My own impression (after testing all the evidence to be gathered from friend and foe) is, that these old ladies, though they may have been sealed to Joseph for eternity, were not his wives in the sense in which Emma, like the rest of women, would use the word wife. I think they were his spiritual queens and com- panions, chosen after the method of the "Wesleyan Perfectionists; with a view, not to pleasures of the flesh, but to the glories of another world. Young may be technically right in the dispute ; but the Pro- phet's sons are, in my opinion, legally and morally in the right. It is my firm conviction, that if the practice of plurality should become a permanent conquest of this American church, the Saints will not owe it to Joseph Smith, but to Brigham Young. 226 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER XXXI. SEALING. Much confusion comes upon us from the use of this word sealing in the English sense of marriage. Seal- ing may mean marriage ; it may also mean something else. A woman can he sealed to a man without be- coming his wife, as we have found in the case of Jo- seph's supposed widows ; also in the instance of Eliza Snow, the poetess, who, in spite of being sealed to Young, is called Miss Snow, and regarded by her peo- ple as a spinster. Consummation, necessary in wed- lock, is not necessary in sealing. Marriage is secular; sealing is both secular and celestial. A strange peculiarity which the Saints have intruded into the finer relations of husband and wife is that of continuity. Their right of sealing man and woman to each other may be for either time or eternity; that is to say, the man may take the woman as his wife either for this world only, as we all do in the Christian church, or for this world during life and the next world after death. The lite has some inkling of the ideas on which these Saints proceed, since he dreams that in the hunting-grounds beyond the sunset he will be accompanied by his faithful dog and his favorite squaw. The Mosaic Arab, when the thought of a re- surrection dawned upon his mind, peopled his heaven with the men and women whom he had known on earth, and among the rights which he carried forward into the brighter land, was that of claiming the society of his mortal wife. The Moslem Arab, though he has learned from a later poetry to adorn his paradise with SEALING. 227 angelic houris, still fancies that a faithful warrior who prays for such a blessing will be allowed to associate in heaven with the humble partner of his cares on earth. It is only in our higher, holier heaven that these human joys and troubles are unknown, that there is no giving and taking in marriage, that the spirits of the just become as the angels of God. Upon the actual relations of husband and wife, Ute and Arab theories of reunion after death in the old bonds of wedlock have no effect beyond that of excit- ing a good and loving woman to strive with a warmer zeal to satisfy the affections of her lord, so as to ensure her place by his side in the celestial wigwam, in a paradisiacal tent. But among the Saints of Salt Lake the notion of a marriage for time being a contract, not only different in duration, but also in nature, from the sealing for eternity, has led to very strange and wholly practical results. A Mormon elder preaches the doc- trine that a woman who has been sealed to one hus- band for time may be sealed to another for eternity. This sealing must be done on earth, and it may be done in the lifetime of her earlier lord. In some degree, it is a gift to the woman of a second choice ; for among these Saints the female enjoys nearly the same power of selecting her celestial bridegroom as the male enjoys of selecting his mortal bride. Of course, the questionfis always coming forward as to what rights over her person on earth this sealing of a woman's soul for eternity confers. May the celestial rite be performed without the knowledge and consent of the husband for time ? Can it be com- pleted without invasion of his conjugal claims? Is it clear that any man would suffer his wife to be sealed to another if he were told of the fact, since an engage- ment for eternity must be of more solemn nature and 228 N^W AMERICA more binding force than the minor contract for time ? It is not probable that the intimacies of a man and woman who are linked to each other in the higher bond would be more close and secret than the intima- cies of earth. Some Saints deny that it is a com.mon thing in Utah for a woman to be sealed to one man for earth and another man for heaveii. It may not be common ; but it occurs in more than one family ; it gives occa- sion for some strife ; and the humbler Saint has less protection against abuse of such an order than he would like to enjoy. Young is here the lord of all. If the Prophet says to an elder, "Take her," the woman will be taken, whether for good or evil. Often, I am told, these second and superior nuptials are made in secret, in the recesses of the endowment-house, with the help of two or three confidential chiefs. No notice of them is given ; it is doubtful whether any record of them is kept. What man, then, with a pretty wife, can feel sure that her virtue will not be tempted by his elders into forming that strange, indefinite relation for another world with a husband of superior rank in the church ? The office of priest, of prophet, of seer, has in every country a peculiar charm for women ; what curates are in London, abbes in Paris, mollahs in Cairo, gosains in Benares, tViese elders and apostles are in Utah ; with the add^l grace of a personal power to advance their female votaries to the highest of celestial thrones. Except the guru of Bombay, no priest on earth has so large a power of acting on every weakness of the female heart as a Mormon bishop at Salt Lake. Who shall assure the humbler Saint that priests possessing so much power in heaven and on earth will never, in these secret sealings for eternity, violate his right, outrage his honor, as a married man ? SEALING. 229 Another familiarity, not less strange, which the Mormons have introduced into these delicate relations of husband and wife, is that of sealing a living person to the dead. The marriage for time is an affair of earth, and must be contracted between a living man and a living woman ; but the marriage for eternity, being an affair of heaven, may be contracted, say these Saints, with either the living or the dead ; provided always that it be a real engagement of the persons, sanctioned by the Prophet, and solemnized in the proper form. In any case it must be a genuine union ; a true marriage, in the canonical sense, and according to the written law ; not a Platonic rite, an attachment of souls, which would bind the two parties together in a mystical bond only. There comes the rub. How can a woman be united in this carnal conjunction to a man in his grave? By the machinery of substitution, say the Saints. Substitution ! Can there be such a thing in marriage as either one man, or one woman, standing in the place of another? Young has declared it. The Hebrews had a glimmering sense of some such dogma, when they bade the younger brother perform a brother's part ; and are not all the Saints one family in the sight of God ? Among the Hebrews, this rule of taking a brother's widow to wife was an exception to general laws ; and in the Arab legislation of Mohammed, it was put away as a remnant of polyandry, a thing abominable and unclean. Ko settled people has ever gone back to that rule of a pastoral tribe. But Young, who has no fear of science, deals in auda- cious originality with this and with every other ques- tion of female right, A woman may choose her own bridegroom of the skies, but, like the man who would take a second wife, the woman who desires to marry 230 N'EW AMEBIC A. a dead husband, can do it in no other way than on Young's intercession and by his consent. Say, that a girl of erratic fancy takes into her head the notion that she would like to become one of the heavenly queens of a departed saint; nothing easier, should her freak of imagination jump with the Prophet's humor. Young is her only judge, his yea or nay her measure of right and wrong. By a religious act, he can seal her to the dead man, whom she has chosen to be her own lord and king in heaven ; by the same act he can give her a substitute on earth from among his elders and apostles ; should her beauty tempt his eye, he may accept for himself the office of proxy for her departed saint. In the Tabernacle I have been shown two ladies who are sealed to Young by proxy as the wives of Joseph; the Prophet himself tells me there are many more ; and of these two I can testify that their relations to him are the same as those of any other mortal wives. They are the mothers of children who bear his name. Two of the young ladies whom we saw on the stage, Sister Zina and Sister Emily, are daughters of women who profess to be Joseph's widows. About the story of all these ladies there is an atmosphere of doubt, of mystery, which we can hardly pierce. Two of them live under Brigham's roof; a third lives in a cottage before his gate ; a fourth is said to live with her daugh- ter at Cotton Wood Canyon. My own impression is, that while some of the old ladies may have been sealed to the Prophet as his spiritual wives only, these younger women elected him to be their lord and king years after his death. Joseph is the favorite bridegroom of the skies. Per- haps it is in nature, that if women are allowed to choose their spouses, they should select the occupants SEALING. 231 of thrones; certain it is that many Mormon ladies yearn towards the bosom of Joseph, not poetically, as their Christian sisters speak of lying in the bosom of Abraham, but potentially, as the Hindoo votary of Krishna languishes for her darling god. Young, it is said, keeps all such converts to himself; the dead Prophet's dignity being so high that none save his successor in the temple is considered worthy to be his substitute in the harem. Beauties whom Joseph never saw in the flesh, who were infants and Gentiles when the riots of Carthage took place, are now sealed to him for eternity, and are bearing children in his name. Except the yearning of Hindoo women towards their darling idol, there is perhaps no madness of the earth so strange as this erotic passion of the female Saints for the dead. A lady of New York was smitten by an uncontrollable desire to become a wife to the mur- dered Prophet. She made her way to Salt Lake, threw herself at Brigham's feet, and prayed with gen- uine fervor to be sealed to him in Joseph's name. Young did not want her; his harem was full; his time was occupied : he put her off" with words ; he sent her away ; but the ardor of her passion was too hot, to damp, too strong to stem. She took him by assault, and he at length gave way ; after sealing her to Joseph for eternity, he accepted towards her the office of sub- stitute in time, and carried her to his house. On the other side, the Mormons affect to have such power over spirits as to be able to seal the dead to the living. Elder Stenhouse tells me that he has one dead wife, who was sealed to him, by her own entreaty, after her death. He had known this young lady very well ; he describes her as beautiful and charming ; she had captivated his fancy ; and in due time, had she 232 NEW AMEBIC A. lived, he might have proposed to make her his wife. While he was absent from Salt Lake City on a mis- sion, she fell sick and died ; on her death-bed she ex- pressed an ardent wish to be sealed to him for eternity, that she might share the glories of his celestial throne. Young made no objection to her suit; and on Sten- house's return from Europe to Salt Lake the rite was performed, in the presence of Brigham and others, his first wife standing proxy for the dead girl, both at the altar and afterwards. He counts the lost beauty as one of his wives ; believing that she will reign with him in heaven. CHAPTER XXXH. WOMAN AT SALT LAKE. And what, as regards the woman herself, is the visible issue of this strange experiment in social and family life ? During our fifteen days' residence among the Saints, we have had as many opportunities aflbrded us for forming a judgment on this question as has ever been given to Gentile travellers. We have seen the Presi- dent and some of the apostles daily; we have been received into many Mormon houses, and introduced to nearly all the leading Saints; we have dined at their tables; we have chatted with their wives; we have romped and played with their children. The feelings which we have gained as to the effect of Mormon life on the character and position of woman, are the growth of care, of study, and experience ; and our WOMAN A T SAL T LAKE. 233 friends at Salt Lake, we hope, while they will differ from our views, will not refuse to credit us with can- dor and good faith. If you listen to the elders only, you would fancy that the idea of a plurality of wives excites in the female breast the wildest fanaticism. They tell you that a Mormon preacher, dwelling on the examples of Sarai and of Rachel, iinds his most willing listeners on the female benches. They say that a ladies' club was formed at Nauvoo to foster polygamy, and to make it the fashion ; that mothers preach it to their daughters ; that poetesses praise it. They ask you to believe that the first wife, being head of the harem, takes upon herself to seek out and court he prettiest girls ; only too proud and happy when she can bring a new Hagar, a new Billah to her husband's arms. This male version of the facts is certainly supported by such female writers as Belinda Pratt. In my opinion, Mormonism is not a religion for woman. I will not say that it degrades her, for the term degradation is open to abuse ; but it certainly lowers her, according to our Gentile ideas, in the social scale. In fact, woman is not in society here at all. The long blank walls, the embowered cottages, the empty windows, doorways, and verandas, all sug- gest to an English eye something of the jealousy, the seclusion, the subordination of a Moslem harem, rather than the gayety and freedom of a Christian home. Men rarely see each other at home, still more rarely in the company of their wives. Seclusion seems to be a fashion wherever polygamy is the law. N^ow, by itself, and apart from all doctrines and moralities, the habit of secluding women from society must tend to dim their sight and dull their hearing; for if conver- sation quickens men, it still more quickens women ; 20* 234 NEW AMU BIG A. and we can roundly say, after experience in many households at Salt Lake, that these Mormon ladies have lost the practice and the power of taking part even in such light talk as animates a dinner-table and a drawing-room. We have met with only one excep- tion to this rule, that of a lady who had been upon the stage. In some houses, the wives of our hosts, with babies in their arms, ran about the rooms, fetching in champagne, drawing corks, carrying cake and fruit, lighting matches, iceing water, while the men were lolling in chairs, putting their feet out of window, smoking cigars, and tossing off beakers of wine. (N. B. — Abstinence from wine and tobacco is recom- mended by Young and taught in the Mormon schools; but we found cigars in many houses, and wine in all except in the hotels !) The ladies, as a rule, are plainly, not to say poorly, dressed; with no bright colors, no gay flounces and furbelows. They are very quiet and subdued in manner, with what appeared to us an un- natural calm ; as if all dash, all sportiveness, all life, had been preached out of them. They seldom smiled, except with a wai'i and wearied look ; and though they are all of English race, we have never heard them laugh with the bright merriment of our English girls. They know very little, and feel an interest in very few things. I assume that they are all great at nursing, and I know that many of them are clever at drying and preserving fruit. But they are habitually shy and reserved, as though they were afraid lest your bold opinion on a sunset, on a watercourse, or a mountain-range, should be considered by their lords as a dangerous intrusion on the sanctities of domestic life. While you are in the house, they are brought into the public room as children are with us ; they come in for a moment, curtsy and shake hands; then WOMAN AT SALT LAKE. 235 drop out again, as though they felt themselves in company rather out of place. I have never seen this sort of shyness among grown women, except in a Syrian tent. Anything like the ease and bearing of an English lady is not to be found in Salt Lake, even among the households of the rich. Here, no woman reigns. Here, no woman hints by her manner that she is mistress of her own house. She does not always sit at table; and when she occupies a place beside her lord, it is not at the head, but on one of the lower seats. In fact, her life does not seem to lie in the parlor and the dining-room, so much as in the. nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and the fruit-shed. The grace, the play, the freedom of a young English lady, are quite unknown to her Mormon sister. Only when the subject of a plurality of wives has been under consideration between host and guest, have I ever seen a Mormon lady's face grow bright, and then it was to look a sentiment, to hint an opinion, the reverse of those maintained by Belinda Pratt. I am convinced that the practice of marrying a plurality of wives is not popular with the female Saints. Besides what I have seen and heard from Mormon wives, themselves living in polygamous families, I have talked, alone and freely, with eight or nine different girls, all of whom have lived at Salt Lake for two or three years. They are undoubted Mormons, who have made many sacrifices for their religion ; but after seeing the family life of their fellow-Saints, they have one and all become firmly hostile to polygamy. Two or three of these girls are pretty, and might have been married in a month. They have been courted very much, and one of them has received no less than seven offers. Some of her lovers are old and rich, some young and poor, with 236 N^W AMERICA. their fortunes still to seek. The old fellows have already got their houses full of wives, and she will not fall into the train as either a fifth or a fifteenth spouse ; the young men being true Saints, will not promise to confine themselves for ever to their earliest vows, and so she refuses to wed any of them. All these girls prefer to remain single, — to live a life of labor and dependence — as servants, chambermaids, milliners, charwomen, — to a life of comparative ease and leisure in the harem of a Mormon bishop. It is a common belief, gathered in a great measure from the famous letter on plurality by Belinda Pratt, that the Mormon Sarai is willing to seek out, and eager to bestow, any number of Hagars on her lord. More than one Saint has told me that this is true, as a rule, though he admits there may be exceptions in so far as the Mormon Sarai falls short of her high calling. My experience lies among the exceptions solely. Some wives may be good enough to undertake this office. I have never found one who would own it, even in the presence of her husband, and when the occasion might have been held to warrant a little feminine fibbing. Every lady to whom I have put this question flushed iiito denial, though with that caged and broken courage which seems to characterize every Mormon wife. "Court a new wife for him!" said one lady; "no woman could do that ; and no woman would submit to be courted by a woman." The process of taking either a second or a sixteenth wife is the same in all cases. " I will tell you," said a Mormon elder, " how we do these things in our order. For example, I have two wives living, and one wife dead. I am thinking of taking another, as I can well afford the expense, and a man is not much respected in the church who has less than three wives. WOMAN AT SALT LAKE, 237 Well, I fix my mind on a young lady, and consider within myselip whether it is the will of God that I should seek her. If I feel, in my own heart, that it would be right to try, I speak to my bishop, who advises and approves, as he shall see fit ; on which I go to the President, who will consider whether I am a good man and a worthy husband, capable of ruling my little household, keeping peace among my wives, bringing up my children in the fear of God ; and if I am found worthy, in his sight, of the blessing, I shall obtain permission to go on with the chase. Then I lay the whole matter of my desire, my permission and my choice, before my first wife, as head of my house, and take her counsel as to the young lady's habits, character, and accomplishments. Perhaps I may speak with my second wife ; perhaps not ; since it is not so much her business as it is that of my first wife ; besides which, my first wife is older in years, has seen more of life, and is much more of a friend to me than the second. An objection on the first wife's part would have great weight with me ; I should not care much for what the second either said or thought. Supposing all to go well, I should next have a talk with the young lady's father; and if he consented to my suit, I should then address the young lady herself." "But before you take all these pains to get her," I asked, " would you not have tried to be sure of your ground with the lady herself? Would you not have courted her and won her good will before taking all these persons into your trust? " "1^0," answered the elder; "I should think that wrong. In our society we are strict. I should have seen the girl, in the theatre, in the tabernacle, in the social hall ; I should have talked with her, danced with her, walked about with her, and in these ways ascer- 238 NEW AMERICA. tained her merits and guessed her inclinations ; but I should not have made love to her, in your sense of the word, got up an understanding with her, and entered into a private and personal engagement of the affec- tions. These affairs are not of earth, but of heaven, and with us they must follow the order of God's king- dom and church." This elder's two wives live in separate houses, and seldom see each other. While we have been at Salt Lake, a child of the second wife has fallen sick ; there has been much trouble in the house ; and we have heard the first wife, at whose cottage we were dining, say she would go and pay the second wife a visit. The elder would not hear of such a thing ; and he was certainly right, as the sickness was supposed to be diphtheria, and she had a brood of little folks plajang about her knees. Still the manner of her proposal told us that she was not in the habit of daily inter- course with her sister-wife. It is an open question in Utah whether it is better for a plural household to be gathered under one roof or not. Young sets the example of unity, so far at least as his actual wives and children are concerned. A few old ladies, who have been sealed to him for heaven, whether in his own name or in that of Jo- seph, dwell in cottages apart ; but the dozen women, who share his couch, who are the mothers of his chil- dren, live in one block close to another, dine at one table, and join in the family prayers. Taylor, the apostle, keeps his families in separate cottages and orchards ; two of his wives only live in his principal house ; the rest have tenements of their own. Every man is free to arrange his household as he likes ; so long as he avoids contention, and promotes the public peace. WOMAN AT SALT LAKE. 239 " How will you arrange your visits, when you have won and sealed your new wife ? " I asked my friendly and communicative elder; "shall you adopt the Ori- ental custom of equal justice and attention to the ladies laid down by Moses and by Mohammed?" " By heaven, sir," he answered, with a flush of scorn, "no man shall tell me what to do, except " giving the initials of his name. " You mean you will do as you like ? " " That 's just it:' And such, I believe, is the universal habit of thought in this city and this church. Man is king, and woman has no rights. She has, in fact, no re- cognized place in creation, other than that of a ser- vant and companion of her lord. Man is master, woman is slave. I cannot wonder that girls who re- member their English homes should shrink from marriage in this strange community, even though they have accepted the doctrine of Young, that plu- rality is the law of heaven and of God. " I believe it 's right," said to me a rosy English damsel, who has been three years in Utah, " and I think it is good for those who like it ; but it is not good for me, and I will not have it." "But if Young should command you?" "He won't!" said the girl with the toss of her golden curls ; " and if he were to do so, I would not. A girl can please herself whether she marries or not; and I, for one, will never go into a house where there is another wife." "Do the wives dislike' it?" " Some don't, most do. They take it for their reli- gion ; I can't say any woman likes it. Some women live very comfortably together ; not many;' most have their tiffs and quarrels, though their husbands may 240 NUW AMERICA. never know of them, ^^o woman likes to see a new wife come into the house." A Saint would tell you that such a damsel as my rosy" friend is only half a Mormon yet; he would probably ask you to reject such evidence as trumpery and temporary ; and plead that you can have no fair means of judging such an institution as polygamy, until you are able to study its effects in the fourth and fifth generation. Meanwhile, the judgment which we have formed about it from what we have seen and heard may be expressed in a few words. It finds a new place for woman, which is not the place she occupies in the society of England and the United States. It trans- fers her from the drawing-room to the kitchen, and when it finds her in the nursery it locks her in it. We may call such a change a degradation ; the Mor- mons call" it a reformation. We do not say that any of these Mormon ladies have been worse in their mo- ralities and their spiritualities by the change ; proba- bly they have not; but in everything that concerns their grace, order, rank, and representation in society, they are unquestionably lowered, according to our standards. Male Saints declare that in this city women have become more domestic, wifely, motherly, than they are among the Gentiles; and that what they have lost in show, in brilliancy, in accomplishment, they have gained in virtue and in service. To me, the very best women appear to be little more than domestic drudges, never rising into the rank of real friends and companions of their lords. Taylor's daughters waited on us at table ; two pretty, elegant, English-looking girls. We should have preferred standing behind their chairs and helping them to dainties of fowl and cake; but the Mormon, like the THE REPUBLICAN PLATEORM. 241 Moslem, keeps a heavy hand on his female folks. Women at Salt Lake are made to keep their place. A girl must address her father as " Sir," and she would hardly presume to sit down in his presence until she had received his orders. "Women," said Young to me, "will be more easily saved than men. They have not sense enough to go far wrong. Men have more knowledge and more power ; therefore they can go more quickly and more certainly to hell." The Mormon creed appears to be that woman is not worth damnation. In the Mormon heaven, men, on account of their sins, may stop short in the stage of angels ; but women, whatever their offences, are all to become the wives of o:ods. CHAPTER XXXm. THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM. "We mean to put that business of the Mormons through," says a New England jjolitician ; " we have done a bigger job than that in the South ; and we shall now fix up things in Salt Lake City." "Do you mean by force?" asks an English trav- eller. " Well, that is one of our planks. The Republican Platform pledges us to crush those Saints." This conversation, passing across the hospitable board of a renowned publicist in Philadelphia, draws towards itself from all sides the criticism of a distin- 21 242 NEW AMERICA. guished company of lawyers and politicians; most of them members of Congress ; all of them soldiers of the Republican phalanx. "Do you hold," says the English guest, — "you as a writer and thinker, — your party as the representatives of American thought and might, — that in a country where speech is free and tolerance wide, it would be right to employ force against ideas, — to throw horse and foot into a dogmatic quarrel, — to set about pro- moting morality with bayonets and bowie-knives?" "It is one of our planks," says a young member of Congress, " to put down those Mormons, who, besides, being infidels, are also Conservatives and Copper- heads." "Young is certain!}' a Democrat," adds an Able Editor from Massachusetts, himself a traveller in the Mormon land; "Ave have no right to burn his block on account of his politics ; nor, indeed, on account of hi < religion ; we ave no power to meddle with any man's faith ; but we have made a law against j)lurality of wives, and we have the power to make our laws respected everywhere in this Republic?" "By force?" " By force, if we are driven by disloyal citizens to the use of force." "You mean, then, that in any case you will use force — passively, if they submit; actively, if they resist?" " That's our notion," replies our candid host. "The government must crush them. That is our big job ; and next year we must put it through." " You hold it right, then, to combat such an evil as polygamy with shot and shell?" "We have freed four million negroes with shot and shell?" replies a sober Pennsylvanian judge. " Pardon me, is that a full statement of the case ? THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM. 243 That you have crushed a movement of secession by means of military force is true ; but is it not also true that, five or six years ago, every one acknowledged that slavery was a legal and moral question, which, while peace and order reigned in the slave-states, ought not to be treated otherwise than on legal and moral grounds?" " Yes, that is so. We had no right over the negroes until their masters went into rebellion. I admit that the declaration of war gave us our only standing." " In fact, you confess that you had no right over the blacks until you had gained, through the rebellion, a complete authority over the whites who held them in bondage?" " Certainly so." "If, then, the planters had been quiet; keeping to the law as it then stood ; never attempting to spread themselves by force, as they tried to do in Kansas ; you would have been compelled, by your sense of right, to leave them to time and reason, to the exhaustion of their lands, to the depopulation of their States, to the growth of sound economical knowledge, — in short, to the moral forces which excite and sustain all social growths ? " " Perhaps so," answers the Able Editor. " The Saints have not yet given us such a chance. They are very honest, sober, industrious people, who mind their own business mainly, as men will have to do who try to live in yon barren plains. They are useful in their way, too ; linking our Atlantic states with the Pacific states; and feeding the mining population of Idaho, Montana, and Nevada. We have no ground of com- plaint, none that a politician would prefer against them beyond their plural households; but New Eng- land is very sore just now about them ; for everybody 244 NEW AMERICA. ill tliis country has got into the habit of calling them the spawn of our New England conventicles, simply because Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Heber Kim- ball, all the chief lights of their church, happen to be New England men." " When New England," adds a representative from Ohio, with a laugh, "goesniiad on any point, you will find that she contrives in this Republic to have her way." "When her way is just and open — sanctioned by moral principle and by human experience — it is well that she should have her way. But will Harvard and Cambridge support an attack by military power on religious bodies because they have adopted the model of Abraham and David ? You have in those western plains and mountains a hundred tribes of red-men who practise polygamy ; would you think it right for your missionary society to withdraw^ from among them the teacher and his Bible, and for General Grant to send out in their stead the soldier and his sword ? You have in those western territories a hundred thousand yellow men who also practise polygamy ; would you hold it just to sink their ships, to burn their ranches, to drive them from your soil, with sword and fire?" "Their case is difterent to that of the Saints," rejoins the Able Editor; "these red-skins and yellow-skins are savages ; one race may die out, the other may go back to Asia ; but Young and Kimball are our own people, knowing the law and the Gospel ; and whatever they may do with the Gospel, they must obey the law." " Of course, everybody must obey the law ; but how? Those Saints, I hear, have no objection to your law when administeredby judge and jury, only to your law when administered by colonels and subalterns." "In other w^ords," savs the Pennsylvanian judge, THE REPUPLIGAN PLATFORM. 245 "they have no objection to our law when they are left to carry it out themselves." "We must put them down," cries the young mem- ber of Congress. " Have you not tried that policy of putting them down twice already ? Yon found them twelve thou- sand strong at Independence, in Missouri ; not liking their tenets (though they had no polygamy among them then), you crushed and scattered them into thirty thousand at Nauvoo ; where you again took arms against religious passion, slew their Prophet, plundered their city, drove them into the desert, and generally dispersed and destroj-ed them into one hundred and twenty-seven thousand in Deseret! You know that some such law of growth through persecution has been detected in every land and in every church. It is a proverb. In Salt Lake City, I heard Brigham Young tell his departing missionaries, they were not to sug- gest the beauty of their mountain home, but to dwell on the idea of persecution, and to call the poor into a persecuted church. Men fly into a persecuted church, like moths into a flame. If you want to make all the western country Mormon, you must send an army of a hundred thousand troops to the Rocky Moun- tains." "But we can hardly leave these pluralists alone." "Why not — so far at least as regards bayonets and bowie-knives ? Have you no faith in the power of truth? Have you no confidence in being right? Nay, are you sure that you have nothing to learn from them ? Have not the men who thrive where nobody else can live, given ample evidence that, even though their doctrines may be strange and their morals false, the principles on which they till the soil and raise their crops, are singularly sound ?" 21* 246 ^^"W AMEBIC A. "I admit," says the Able Editor, "they are good farmers." " Good is a poor term, to express the marvel they have wrought. In Illinois, they changed a swamp into a garden. In Utah, they have made the desert green with pastures and tawny with maize and corn. Of what is Brigham Young most fond ? Of his harem, his temple, his theatre, his office, his wealth ? He may pride himself on these things in their measure ; but the fact of his life which he dwelt upon most, and with the noblest enthusiasm, is the raising of a crop of ninety-three and a half bushels of wheat from one single acre of land. The Saints have grown rich with a celerity that seems magical even in the United States. Beginning life at the lowest stage, recruited only from among the poor, spoiled of their goods and driven from their farms, compelled to expend millions of dollars in a perilous exodus, and finally located on a soil from which the red-skin and the bison had all but retired in despair, they have yet contrived to exist, to extend their operations, to increase their stores. The hills and valleys round Salt Lake are everywhere smiling with wheat and rye. A city has been built; great roads have been made ; mills have been erected ; canals have been dug; forests have been felled. A depot has been formed in the wilderness from which the miners from Montana and Nevada can be fed. A chain of communication from St. Louis to San Fran- cisco has been laid. Are the Republican majority prepared to undo the progress of twenty years in order to curb an obnoxious doctrine? Are they sure that the attempt being made, it would succeed ? What facts in the past history of these Saints permit you to infer that persecution, however sharp, would diminish their nimiber, their audacity, and their zeal ? " THE REP UBLIGA N PL A TFORM. 24 7 " Then you see no way of crushing them ? " "Crashing them! No; none. I see no way of dealing with any moral and religious question except by moral means employed in a religious spirit. Why not put your trust in truth, in logic, in history ? Why not open good roads to Salt Lake ? Why not encour- age railway communication ; and bring the practical intellect and noble feeling of New England to bear upon the household. of many wives? Why not meet their sermons by sermons ; try their science by sci- ence ; encounter their books with books? Have you no missionaries equal to Elder Stenhouse and Ekler Dewey ? You must expect that while you act on the Saints, the Saints will re-act upon you. It will be for you a trial of strength ; but the weapons will be legit- imate and the conclusions will be blessed. Can you not trust the right side and the just cause, to come out victoriously from such a struggle ? " "Well," says the judge, "while we are divided in opinion, perhaps, as to the use of physical force, we are all in favor of moral force. Massachusetts is our providence ; but, after all, we must have one law in this Republic. Union is our motto, equality our creed. Boston and Salt Lake City must be got to shake hands, as Boston and Charleston have already done. If 3'ou can persuade Brigham to lie down with Bowles, I am willing to see it And now pass the wine." 248 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER XXXIV. UNCLE SAM'S estate. In climbing the slopes of you rivers from New'York to Toledo; in running down the Mississippi Valley from Toledo to St. Louis ; in mounting the Prairies from St. Louis to Virginia Dale; in crossing the Sier- ras from Virginia Dale to the Great Salt Lake; in winding through the "Wasatch chain, the Bitter-creek country, and the Plains from Salt Lake City to Oma- ha; in descending the Missouri from the middle waters to its mouth; in traversing the table-lands of Indiana and Ohio; in threading the mountain-passes of Penn- sylvania; in piercing the forests, following the streams, lounging in the cities of Virginia; in pacing these streets of Washington, mixing with these people in the gardens of the White House, and under the dome of the Capitol, a man will find himself growing free of many great facts. He will be in daily contact with the newest forms of life, with a world in the earlier stages of its growth, with a society everywhere young in genius, enterprise, and virtue; but probably no other fact will strike his imagination with so large a force as the size of what is here called, in the idiom of the people. Uncle Sam's Estate. "Sir," said to me a Minnesota farmer, "the curse of this country is that we have too much land;" a phrase which I have heard again and again; among the iron-masters of Pittsburg, among the tobacco- planters of Richmond, among the cotton-spinners of Worcester. Indeed, this wail against the land is com- UNCLE SAM'B ESTATE. 249 mon among men who, having mines, plantations, mills, and farms, wonld like to have large supplies of labor at lower rates of wages than the market yields. There have been times in which a similar cry was raised in England, by the Norfolk farmers, by the Manchester spinners, by the Newcastle coalmen. Those who want to get labor on the lowest terms must always be in favor of restricting the productive acreage of land. But whether a Minnesota farmer, a Pennsylvania miner, or a Massachusetts cotton-spinner, may like it or dis- like it, nobody can dispute the fact that the first im- pression stamped on a traveler's eye and brain in this great country is that of stupendous size. During the Civil War, when the Trent aftair was waxing warm between the two main branches of our race — a brother's quarrel, in which there was some right and a little wrong on both sides — a New York publisher put out a map of the United States and Ter- ritories, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, from the line of the great lakes to the gulfs of Mexico and California; on the margin of which map there was an outline of England drawn to scale. Perhaps it had not been designed by the draughtsman to rebuke our pride; still, it made us look very small on paper; and if we had been a people piquing ourselves on the possession of "much dirt" in the Home County called England, that map might have cut us to the quick. Space is not one of our island points. In three or four hours we hurry from sea to sea, from Liverpool to Hull, from the Severn to the Thames; in the lapse between breakfast and din- ner we wing our way from London to York, from Manchester to Norwich, from Oxford to Penzance. It is the common joke of New York, that a Yankee in London dares not leave his hotel after dark lest he 250 NEW AMERICA. should slip off the foreland and be drowned in the sea. The Republic owns within her two ocean frontiers more than three million square miles of land; a fourth part of a million square miles of water, either salt or fresh; a range of Alps, a range of Pyrenees, a range of Apennines; forests by the side of which the Schwarzwald and the Ardennes would be German toys; rivers exceeding the Danube and the Rhine, as much as these rivers exceed the Mersey and the Clyde. Under the crystal roof in Hyde Park, when the nations had come together in 1851, each bringing what it found to be its best and rarest to a common testing place, America was for many weeks of May and June represented by one great article — a vast, un- occupied space. An eagle spread its wings over an empty kingdom, while the neighboring states of Bel- gium, Holland, Prussia, and France were crowded like swarms of bees in their summer hives. Some persons smiled with a mocking lip, at that paper bird, brooding in silence above a mighty waste; but I for one never came from the thronging courts of Europe into that large allotment of space and light, without feeling that our cousins of the West had hit, though it may have been by chance, on a very happy expres- sion of their virgin wealth. In Hyde Park, as at home, they showed that they had room enough and to spare. Yes: the Republic is a Dig country. In England, we have no lines of sufficient length, no areas of suf- ficient width, to convey a just idea of its size. Our longest line is that running from Land's End to Ber- wick, — a line which is some miles shorter than the distance from Washington to Lexington. Our broad- UNCLE SAM'S ESTATE. 251 est valley is that of the Thames, — the whole of which would lie hidden from sight in a corner of the Sierra Madre. The State of Oregon is higger than England; California is about the size of Spain ; Texas would be larger than France if France had won the frontier of the German Rhine. If the United States were parted into equal lots, they would make fifty-two kingdoms as large as England, fourteen empires as large as France. Even the grander figure of Europe, — the seat of our great powers, and of many lesser powers, — a continent which we used to call the world, and fight to maintain in delicate balance of parts, — fails us when we come to measure in its lines such amplitudes as those of the United States. To wit; from Eastport to Brownsville is farther than from London to Tuat, in the Great Sahara; from Washington to Astoria is fiir- ther than from Brussels to Kars; from New York to San Francisco is farther than from Paris to Bagdad. Such measures seem to carry us away fi-om the sphere of fact into the realms of magic and romance. Again, take the length of rivers as a measurement of size. A steamboat can go ninety miles up the Thames; two hundred miles up the Seine; five hun- dred and fifty miles up the Rhine. In America, the Thames would be a creek, the Seine a brook, the Rhine a local stream, soon lost in a mightier flood. Some of these great rivers, like the Kansas and the Platte, flow- ing through boundless plains, are nowhere deep enough for steamers, though they are sometimes miles in width; yet the navigable length of many of these streams is a wearisome surprise. The Mississippi is five times longer than the Rhine; the Missouri is three times longer than the Danube; the Columbia is four times longer than the Scheldt. From the sea to Fort Snelling, the Mis- sissippi is plowed by steamers a distance of two thou- 252 NEW AMERICA. sand one hundred and thirty-one miles; yet she is but the second river in the United States, Glancing at a map of America, we see to the north a group of lakes. JS'ow, our English notion of a lake is likely to have been derived from Coniston, Killarney, Lomond, Leman, and Garda. But these sheets of water give us no true hint of what Huron and Superior are like, scarcel}^ indeed of what Erie and Ontario are like. Coniston, Killarney, Lomond, Leman, and Garda, put together, would not cover a tenth part of the surface occupied by the smallest of the five American lakes. All the waters lying in Swiss, Italian, Englisli, Irish, Scotch, and German lakes, might be poured into Michigan without making a perceptible addition to its flood. Yorkshire might be sunk out of sight in Erie; Ontario drowns as much land as would make two duchies equal in area to Schleswig and Holstein. Den- mark proper could be washed by the waves of Huron. Many of the minor lakes of America would be counted as inland seas elsewhere; to wit. Salt Lake, in Utah, has a surface of two thousand square miles; while that of Geneva has only three hundred and thirty; that of Como, only ninety; that of Killarney, only eight. A kingdom like Saxony, a principality like Parma, a duchy like Coburg, if thrown in one heap into Lake Superior, might add an island to its beauty, but would be no more conspicuous in its vast expanse than one of those pretty green islets which adorn Loch Lomond. Mountain masses are not considered by some as the strongest points of American scenery; yet you find masses in this country which defy all measurement by such puny chains as the Pyrenees, the Apennines, and the Savoy Alps. The Alleghanies, ranging in UNGLE SAM'S ESTATE. 253 height between Helvelljn and Pilatus, run through a district equal in extent to the country lying between Ostend and Jaroslaw. The Wasatch chain, though the name is hardly known in Europe, has a larger bulk and grandeur than the Julian Alps. The Sierra Madre, commonly called the Rocky Mountains, ranging in stature from a little below Snowdon to a trifle above Mont Blanc, extend from Mexico, through the Repub- lic into British America, a distance almost equal to that dividing London from Delhi. No doubt, then, can be felt as to the size of this Anglo-Saxon estate. America is a big country; and size, as we know in other things, becomes, in the long run, a measure of political power. Leaving out of view all rivers, all lakes, there re- main in the United States about one thousand nine hundred and twenty-six million acres; nearly all of them productive land; forest, prairie, down, alluvial bottom; all lying in the temperate zone; healthy in climate, rich in wood, in coal, in oil, in iron; a landed estate that could give to each head of five million fami- lies a lot of three hundred and eighty-five acres. 22 254 ^^W AMERICA. CHAPTER XXXV. THE FOUR RACES. On this fine estate of laud and water dwells a strange variety of races. No society in Europe can pretend to such wide contrasts in the type, in the color, as are here observable; for while in France, in Germany, in England, we are all white men, deriving our blood and lineage from a common Aryan stock, and having in our habits, languages, and creeds, a certain bond of brotherhood, our friends in these United States, in ad- dition to such pale varieties as the Saxon and Celt, the Swabian and Caul, have also the Sioux, and N"egro, and the Tartar; nations and tribes, not few in num- ber, not guests of a moment, here to-day and gone to- morrow; but crowding hosts of men and women, who have the rights which come of either being born on the soil or of being settled on it for life. White men, black men, red men, yellow men; they are citizens of this country, paying its taxes, feeding on its produce, obeying its laws. In England we are apt to boast of having fused into one strong amalgam men of the most hostile qualities of blood; blending into a perfect unit the steadfast Saxon, the volatile Celt, the splendid Norman, and the frugal Pict; but our faint distinctions of race and race fade wholly out of sight when they are put alongside of the fierce antagonism seen on this American soil. In the Old World we have separate classes, where in this new country they have opposite nations; we have THE FOUR RACES. THE FOUR RACES. 255 slight variation in the quahty, where they have radical difference in the type. To a negro in Georgia, to a Pawnee in Dakota, to a Chinese in Montana, a white man is just a white man; no more, no less; the Gaul, the Dane, the Spaniard, the Saxon, being, in his sim- ple eyes, brethren of one family, members of one churcli. Our subtler distinctions of race and race are wholly invisible m this stranger's eyes. In the western country you may sit down at dinner in some miner's house with a dozen guests, who shall not be matched, in contrasting types and colors, even in a Cairene bazaar, an Aleppo gateway, a Stamboul mosque. On either side of you may sit — a Polish Jew, an Italian count, a Choctaw chief, a Mexican rancher, a Confederate soldier (there called a "whitewashed reb"), a Mormon bishop, a Sandwich Island sailor, a Parsee merchant, a Boston bagman, a Missouri boss. A negro may cook your meat, a Chinese draw your cork, while the daughters of your host — bright girls, dainty, well dressed — may serve the dishes and pour out your wine; the whole company being drawn into these western regions by the rage for gold, and melt- ing toward each other, more like guests who dine in a E'ew York hotel than like strangers who come either to trade in an Egyptian bazaar, to lodge in a Syrian khan, or pray in a Turkish mosque. You may find, too, under one roof as many creeds as colors. Your host may be a Universalist; one of that soft American sect which holds that nobody on earth will ever be damned, though the generous and illogical fellow can hardly open his lips without calling on one of his guests to be so. The Mormon will put his trust in Joseph, as a natural seer and revelator; the Chinese will worship Buddha, of whom he knows nothing but the name ; the Jew will pray to Jehovah, of whom he 256 NEW AMEBIC A. cannot be said to know much more. The Choctaw chief ma3^ invoke the Big Father, whom white men call for him the Great Spirit, Sam — all negroes there are Sams — may be a Methodist; an Episcopalian Meth- odist, mind you; Sam and his sable brethren hating everything that is low. The Italian count is an in- fidel; the Mexican a Catholic. Your whitewashed reb repudiating all religions, gives his mind to cock- tails. The Missourian is a Come-outer, a member of one of those new churches of America which profess to have brought God nearer to the earth. That the Parsee holds a private opinion about the sun we may fairly guess; Queen Emma's countryman is a Pagan; while the Boston bagman, now a Calvinist, damning the company to future miseries of fire and brimstone, was once a Communist of the school of Noyes. White men, black men, red men, yellow men — all these chief types and colors of the human race — have been drawn into company on this western soil, this middle continent, lying between China and the Archi- pelago on one side, Africa and Europe on the other, where they crowd and contest the ground under a com- mon flag. The White Man, caring for neither frost nor fire, so long as he can win good food for his mouth, fit clothing for his limbs, appears to be the master in every zone ; able to endure all climates, to undertake all labors, to overcome all trials; casting nets into the Bay of Fundy, cradling gold in the Sacramento Valleys, raising dates and lemons in Florida, trapping beavers in Oregon, raising herds of kine in Texas, spinning thread in Massachusetts, clearing woods in Kansas, smelting iron in Pennsylvania, talking buncombe in Columbia, writing leaders in New York. He is the man of plastic genius, of enduring character; equally at home THE FOUR RAGES. 257 among tlie palm-trees and the pines; in every latitude the guide, the employer, and the king of all. The Black Man, a true child of the tropics, to whom warmth is like the breath of life, flees from those bleak fields of the North, in which the white man repairs his fiber and renews his blood; preferring the swamps and savannas of the South, where, among palms, cotton- plants, and sugar-canes, he finds the rich colors in which his eye delights, the sunny heats in which his blood expands. Freedom would not tempt him to go north- ward into frost and fog. Even now, when Massa- chusetts and Connecticut tempt him by the ofier of good wages, easy work, and sympathizing people, he will not go to them. He only just endures New York; the most hardy of his race will hardly stay in Saratoga and Niagara beyond the summer months. Since the South has been made free for Sam to live in, he has turned his back on the cold and friendly North, in search of a brighter home. Sitting in the rice-field, by the canebrake, under the mulberry-trees of his dar- ling Alabama, with his kerchief round his head, his banjo on his knee, he is joyous as a bird, singing his endless and foolish roundelay, and feeling the sunshine burn upon his face. The negro is but a local fact in the country; having his proper home in a corner — the most sunny corner — of the United States. The Red Man, once a hunter of the Alleghanies, not less than of the prairies and the Rocky Mountains, has been driven by the pale-face, he and his squaw, his elk, his buffalo, and his antelope, into the far western country ; into the waste and desolate lands lying west- w^ard of the Mississippi and Missouri. The exceptions hardly break the rule. A band of picturesque peddlers may be found at Niagara; Red Jackets, Cherokee chiefs, and Mohawks ; selling bows and canes, and 258 NEW AMERICA. generally sponging on those youths and damsels who roam about the Falls in search of opportunities to flirt. A colony, hardly of a better sort, may be found at Oneida Creek, in Madison County; the few sowing maize, growing fruit, and singing psalms; the many starving on the soil, cutting down the oak and maple, alienating the best acres, pining after their brethren who have thrown the white man's gift in his face, and gone away with their weapons and their war-paint. Red Jacket at the Falls, Bill Beechtree at Oneida Creek — the first selling beaded work to girls, the sec- ond twisting hickory canes for boys — are the last repre- sentatives of mighty nations, hunters and warriors, who at one time owned the broad lands from the Sus- quehanna to Lake Erie. Red Jacket will not settle; Bill Beechtree is incapable of work. The red-skin will not dig, and to beg he is not ashamed. Hence, he has been pushed away from his place, driven out by the spade, and kept at bay by the smoke of chimney tires. A wild man of the plain and forest, he makes his home with the wolf, the rattlesnake, the buflalo, and the elk. When the wild beast flies, the wild man follows. The Alleghany slopes, on which, only seventy years ago, he chased the elk and scalped the white woman, will hear his war-whoop, see his war-dance, feel his scalp- ing-knife, no more. In the western country he is still a figure in the landscape. From the Missouri to the Colorado he is master of all the open plains ; the forts which the white men have built to protect their road to San Francisco, like the Turkish block-houses built along the Syrian tracks, being mainly of use as a hint of their great reserve of power. The red men find it hard to lay down a tomahawk, to take up a hoe; some thousands only of them have yet done so; some hun- dreds only have learned from the whites to drink gin THE FOUR RACES. 259 and bitters, to lodge in frame-houses, to tear np the soil, to forget the chase, the war-dance, and the Great Spirit. The Yellow Man, generally a Chinese, a Malay, sometimes a Dyak, has been drawn into the Pacific states from Asia, and from the Eastern Archipelago, by the hot demand for labor; any kind of which comes to him as a boon. From digging in the mine to cooking an omelette and ironing a shirt, he is equal to everything by which dollars can be gained. Of these yellow people there are now sixty thousand in Califor- nia, Utah, and Montana ; they come and go ; but many more of them come than go. As yet these harmless crowds are weak and useful. Hop Chang keeps a laun- dry ; Chi Hi goes out as cook ; Cum Thing is a maid- of-all-work. They are in no man's way, and they la- bor for a crust of bread; carrying the hod when Mike has run away to the diggings, and scrubbing the floor when Biddy has made some wretch the happiest of his sex. Supple and patient, these yellow men, though far from strong, are eager for any kind of work; but they prefer the employments of women to those of men; delighting in an engagement to wash clothes, to nurse babies, and to wait on guests. They make very good butlers and chamber-maids. Loo Sing, a jolly old girl in pig-tail, washes your shirts, starching and ironing them very neatly, except that you cannot per- suade him to refrain from spitting on your cuffs and fronts. To him spitting on linen is the same as damp- ing it with drops of water ; and the habits of his life prevent him, even though you should catch him by the pig-tail, and rub his tiny bit of nose on the burning iron, from seeing that it is not the same to you. To- day, those yellow men are sixty thousand weak; in a few years they may be six hundred thousand strong 260 NEW AMERICA. They will ask for votes ; they will hold the balance of parties. In some districts they will make a major- ity; selecting the judges, forming the juries, interpret- ing the laws. Those yellow men are Buddhists, pro- fessing polygamy, practicing infanticide. Next year is not more sure to come in its own season than a great society of Asiatics to dwell on the Pacific slopes. A Buddhist church, fronting the Buddhist churches in China and Ceylon, will rise in California, Oregon, and Nevada. More than all, a war of labor will commence between the races which feed on beef and the races which thrive on rice ; one of those wars in which the victory is not necessarily with the strong. White man, black man, red man, yellow man, each has a custom of his own to follow, a genius of his own to prove, a conscience of his own to respect; custom which is not of kin, genius which is largely diflerent, and conscience which is fiercely hostile. These four great types might be represented to the eye by four of my friends : H. W. Longfellow, poet, Boston ; Eli Brown, waiter, Richmond ; Spotted Dog, savage, Rocky Mountains ; and Loo Sing, Laundry boy, Ne- vada. Under what circumstances will tliey blend into a common stock? SEX AND SEX. 261 CHAPTER XXXVI. SEX AND SEX. JSText, perhaps, after its huge size, and its varied races, the fact which is apt to strike a stranger most in the United States, is the disproportion almost every- where to be noted between sex and sex. To such a dinner as we have imagined taking place in the western country, no woman will have sat down ; not because there are no ladies in the house, but be- cause these ladies have something else to do than dine with guests. Your host may have been a married man, pluming iiimself with very good right, on his winsome wife, his bevy of sparkling girls ; but his wife and her daughters, instead of occupying seats at the board, will have to stand behind the chairs, handing round the dishes, pouring out the tea, aiding Loo Sing to uncork the wine. Females are few in yonder west- ern towns; you may spend day after day without fall- ing in sight of a pretty face. At the wayside inn, when you call for the chamber-maid, either Sam puts in his woolly head, or Chi Hi pops in his shaven crown. Hardly any help can be hired in those wastes ; Molly runs away with a miner ; Biddy gets married to a mer- chant ; and when guests ride in from the track, the fair creatures who live on the spot, the joy of some husband's home, of some father's eyes, have no choice beyond either sending these guests on their way, hun- gry, unrested, or cooking them a dinner and putting it on the board. At Salt Lake, in the houses of Mor- mon apostles and of wealthy merchants, we were al- 262 NEW AMERICA. ways served by the youug ladies, often by extremely delicate and lovely girls. At first this novelty is rather hard to bear ; not by the ladies so much as by their guests. To see a woman who has just been quoting Keats and playing Gounod, standing up behind your seat, uncorking catawba, whipping away plates, and handing you the sauce, is trying to the nerves, especially when you are young and passably polite. In time you get used to it, as you do to the sight of a scalping-knife, to the sound of a war-whoop ; but what can a lady at the mines, on the prairies, on the lonely farmsteads, do when a guest drops in ? Help she has none, excepting Sam and Loo Sing. In that district of many males and few females, every girl is a lady, almost every woman is a wife. Men may be hired at a fair day's wage, to do any kind of male labor; to cook your food, to groom your horse, to trim your garden, to cut your wood; but women to do female work, to make the beds, to serve at table, to nurse the bairns; no, not for the income of a bishop, can you get them. Biddy can do better. Girls who are young and pretty have a lottery full of prizes ready to their hand ; even those who may be old and plain can have husbands when they please. Everywhere west of the Mississippi there is a brisk demand for women; and what girl of spirit would let herself out for hire when the church door is open, and the bridal bells are ready? Who would accept the possition of a wo- man's help when she has only to say the word, and become a man's help-mate ? Your hostess on the Plains m.Siy have been well born, well educated, well dressed ; both she herself and her bevy of girls maybe such as would be considered mag- netic in Fifth Avenue, attractive in May Fair, They may speak French very well; and when some of you SEX AND SEX. 263 selfish fellows gathered under their window to smoke and chat, they will have charmed your ears with the most brilliant passages from Faust. Now, to hear Sibyl's serenade in the shadow of the Rocky Mount- ains is a treat on which you may not have counted; but the fact remains that only one hour earlier in the day the contralto has been acting as your cook. Once before in my life the same sort of thing has occurred to me; in Morocco, where a dark-eyed Judith, daugh- ter of a Jew in whose house I was lodging for the night, first fried my supper of fowls and tomatoes, and then lulled me to sleep by the notes of her guitar as she sat on the door-step. This comedy of the sexes may be found in action, not only out yonder in Colorado and the western prai- ries, but here in the shadow of the Capitol, in every State of the Union, almost in every city of each State. After all the havoc of war, — of which this disparity between males and females was an active, though an unseen, cause, — the evidence of inequality meets you at every turn ; in the ball-rooms at "Washington, in the streets of New York, in the chapels of Boston, at the dinner-tables of Richmond, as well as among the frame sheds of Omaha, in the plantations of Atlanta, in the miners' huts near Denver, in the theater of Salt Lake City. The cry is everywhere for girls; girls — more girls! In a hundred voices you hear the echoes of a common want; the ladies cannot find servants, the dancers cannot get partners, the young men cannot win wives. I was at a ball on the Missouri River where half the men had to sit down, though the girls obligingly danced every set. Compared against the society of Paris and of Lon- don, that of America seems to be all awry. Go into the Madeleine, — it is full of ladies ; go into St. James's 264 NEW A3IERICA. Palace, — it is full of ladies. Every house in England has excess of daughters, about whom mothers have their little dreams, not always unmixed with a little fear. When Blanche is thirty, and still unsettled, her very father must begin to doubt of her ever going out into life. An old adage says that a girl at twenty says to herself, Who will suit me ? at thirty, Whom shall I suit ? Here in America it is not the woman, but the man, who is a drug in the matrimonial market. No Yankee girl is bound, like a Scottish lassie, like an Irish kerne, to serve in another woman's house for bread. Her face is her fortune and her lips a prize; her love more precious than her labor; her two bright orbs of more value than even her nimble hands. War may have thinned, to her disadvantage, the rank and file of lovers, but the losses of male life by shot and shell, by fever and ague, by waste and privation, have been more than replaced to her from Europe ; and the disproportions of sex and sex, noted before the war broke out, are said to be greater since its close. The lists are crowded with bachelors wanting wives ; the price of young men is ruling down, and only the hand- some, well-doing fellows have a chance of going off! This sketch is no effort of a fancy, looking for ex- tremes and loving the grotesque. When the census was compiled (in 1860), the white males were found to be in excess of the white females, by seven hundred and thirty thousand souls. Such a fact has no fellow in Europe, except in the Papal States, where society is made by exceptional forces, governed by exceptional rules. In every other Christian country, — in France, England, Germany, Spain, — the females are in large excess of the males. In France there are two hundred thousand women more than men; in England three hundred and sixty-five thousand. The unusual rule • SEX AND SEX. 265 here noticed in America is not confined to any district, any sea-board, any zone. Out of fifty-two organized States and Territories, only eight exhibit the ordinary rule of European countries. Eight old settlements are supplied with women ; that is to say, Maryland, Massa- chusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Columbia; while the other fifty-four settlements, purchases, and conquests, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, lack this element of a stable, orderly, and virtuous state, — a wife for every young man of a proper age to marry. In some of the western regions, the disparity is such as strikes the moralist with awe: in California there are three men to every woman; in Washington, four men to ev^'y woman; in Nevada, eight men to every woman; in Colorado, twenty men to every woman. This disparity between sex and sex is not wholly caused, as will be thought, by the large immigration of single men. It is so in degree, no doubt, since far more males arrive by ship at Boston and New York than females; but if all the new-comers were sent back, if no fresh male was allowed to land in New York unless he brought with him a female companion, a sister, a wife, still a large percentage of the people would have to go down into their graves unmarried. More males are born than females. Casting ofi" the German and Irish quota, there would still be four men in the hundred in this great Republic for whom nature has sent no female mates. Immigration only comes to the help of nature; Europe sending in hosts of bache- lors to fight for the few women, who would otherwise be insufiicient for the native men. In the whole mass of whites, the disproportion is five in the hundred ; so that one man in every twenty males born in the 23 266 NEW AMERICA. United States can never expect to have a wife of his own. What is hardly less strange than this large displace- ment of the sexes among the white population, is the fact that it is not explained and corrected by any excess in the inferior types. There are more yellow men than yellow women, more red braves than red squaws. Only the negroes are of nearly equal number; a slight excess being counted on the female side. Very few Tartars and Chinese have brought their wives and daughters with them into this country. On their first coming over they expected to get rich in a year, and return to sip tea and grow oranges in their native land. Many of those who are now settled in California and Montana, are sending foi^their mates, who may come or not; having mostly, perhaps, been married again in the absence of their lords. The present rate is eighteen yellow men to one yellow woman. As yet, the red-skins have been counted in groups and patches only; in the more settled districts of Michigan, Minnesota, California, and New Mexico; but in all these districts, though the influences are here unusually favorable to female life, males are found in excess of females, in the proportion of five to four. Think what this large excess of men over women entails, in the way of trial, on American society — think what a state that country must be in which counts up in its fields, in its cities, seven hundred and thirty thousand unmarried men ! Bear in mind that these crowds of prosperous fellows are not bachelors by choice, selfish dogs, woman-haters, men useless to themselves and to the world in which they live. They are average young men, busy and SEX AND SEX. _ 267 pushing; fellows who would rather fall into love than into sin; who would be fond of their wives and proud of their children if society would only provide them with lawful mates. What are they now? An army of monks without the defense of a religious vow. These seven hundred and thirty thousand bachelors have never promised to be chaste; many of them, it may be feared, regard the tenth commandment as little more than a paper law. You say to them in effect, "You are not to pluck these flowers, not to trample on these borders, if you please." Suppose that they will not please? How is the unwedded youth to be hindered from coveting his neighbor's wife? You know what ISTaples is, what Munich is. You have seen the condition of Liverpool, Cadiz, Antwerp, Livorno; of every city, of every port, in which there is a floating population of single men; but in which of these cities do you find any approach to Kew York, in the show of open and triumphant vice ? Men who know New York far worse than myself, assure me that in depth and darkness of iniquity, neither Paris in its private haunts, nor London in its open streets, can hold a candle to it. Paris may be subtler, London may be grosser, in its vices; but for largeness of depravity, for domineering insolence of sin, for rowdy callousness to censure, they tell me the Atliintic City finds no rival on the earth. Do all these evils come with the anchoring ship, and stream from the quays into the city? ISTo one will say so. The quays of New York are like the quays of any other port. They are the haunts of drabs and thieves; they are covered with grogshops and stews; but the men who land on those quays are not viler in taste than those who land in Southampton, in Hamburg, in Genoa. What, then, makes the Empire City a cess- 268 NEW AMERICA. pool by the side of which European ports seem almost pure ? My answer is, mainly the disparity of sex and sex. 'New York is a great capital; rich and pleasant, gay and luxurious; a city of freedom, a city of pleasure, to which men come from every part of the Union ; this man for trade, that for counsel, a third for relaxation, a fourth for adventure. It is a place for the idle man, as well as for the busy man. Crowds flock to its hotels, to its theaters, to its gaming-houses; and we need no angel from heaven to tell us what kind of company will amuse an unmarried man having dollars in his purse. On the other side, this demand for mates who can never be supplied, not in one place only, but in every place alike, aft'ects the female mind with a variety of plagues; driving your sister into a thousand restless agitations about her rights and powers; into debating woman's era in history, woman's place in creation, woman's mission in the family; into public hysteria, into table-rapping, into anti-wedlock societies, into theories about free love, natural marriage, and artistic mater- nity; into anti-offspring resolutions, into sectarian polygamy, into free trade of the affections, into com- munity of wives. Some part of this wild disturbance of the female mind, it may be urged, is due to the free- dom and prosperity which women find in America as compared against what they enjoy in Europe; but this freedom, this prosperity, are in some degree, at least, the consequences of that disparity in numbers which makes the hand of every young girl in the United States a positive prize. LADIES. 269 CHAPTER XXXVII. "The American lady has not made an American home," says sly old Mayo; a truth which I should hardly have found out, had I not met with it in an American author. Ladies, it is true, are very much at home in hotels; but I have only to remember certain streets in Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New- York — indeed, in Denver, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis — to feel that America has homes as bright as any to be found in Middlesex and Kent. "What do you say, now, to our ladies?" said to me a bluff Yankee, as we sat last night under the veranda, here in the hotel at Saratoga. "Charming," of course I answered, "pale, delicate, bewitching; dashing, too, and radiant." "Hoo!" cried he, putting up his hands; "they are just not worth a d . They can't walk, they can't ride, they can't nurse." "Ah, you have no wife," said I, in a soothing tone. "A wife!" he shouted; "I should kill her." "With kindness?" "Ugh!" he answered; "with a poker. Look at these chits here, dawdling by the fountain. What are they doing now ? what have they done all day? Fed and dressed. They have changed their clothes three times, and had their hair washed, combed, and curled three times. That is their life. Have they been out for a walk, for a ride ? Have they read a book ? have they sewn a seam ? jSTot a bit of it. How do your ladies spend their time ? They put on good 23* 270 NEW AMEBIC A. boots, they tuck up their skirts, and hark away through the country lanes. I was in Hampshire once ; my host was a duke ; his wife was out before breakfast, with clogs on her feet and roses on her cheeks ; she rode to the hunt, she walked to the copse ; a ditch would not frighten her, a hedge would not turn her back. T.'liy, our women, poor, pale ." "Come," I said, "they are very lovely." "Ugh!" said the saucy fellow, "they have no bone, no fibre, no juice; they have only nerves; but what can you expect? They eat pearlash for bread ; they drink ice-water for wine ; they wear tight stays, thin shoes, and barrel skirts. Sucli things are not fit to live, and, thank God, in a hundred years not one of their descendants will be left alive." When looking at these sweet New England girls, as they go trooping past my window, I cannot help feel- ing that with this delicate pallor, winsome and poetic as it looks to an artist in female beauty, there must be lack of vital power. My saucy friend had got an ink- ling of the truth. Would that these dainty cousins of ours were a trifle more robust! I could forgive them for a little rose-blush on the cheek ; at present you can hardly speak to them without fearing lest they should vanish from before your face. Woman, in her time, has been called upon to endure a great deal of definition. In prose and in verse she has been called an angel, a harpy, a saint, an ogress, a guardian, a fate ; she has been likened to a rose and a palm, to the nightshade and the upas; she has been painted as a dove and a gazelle, a magpie and a fox. Poetry has made her a fawn, a nightingale, a swan ; while satire has represented her as a jay, a serpent, and a cat. By way of coming to a middle term, a wit described her as a good idea — spoiled! Wit, poetry, satire, only LADIES. 271 exhaust their terms ; for how can a phrase describe au iufinite variety? A lady, as a single type, would, perhaps, be easier to define than woman ; she would certainly be easier to express by an example. Asked to produce a perfect woman, I might hesitate long, comparing strength and weakness, merit and frailty, so as to get them in the most subtle relations to each other; asked to produce a perfect lady, I should point to Miss Stars at Wash- ington, Mrs. Bars of Boston, and to many more. Not that perfect ladies are more common than perfect wo- men ; they are far less common ; but we seize the type more easily, and we know in what soils to expect their growth. A typical woman is a triumph of Nature ; a typical lady is a triumph of Art. Among the higher classes in America, the traditions of English beauty have not declined; the oval face, the delicate lip, the transparent nostril, the pearl-like flesh, the tiny hand, which mark in May Fair the lady of high descent, may be seen in all the best houses of Virginia and Massachusetts. The proudest London belle, the fixirest Lancashire witch, would find in Bos- ton and in Richmond rivals in grace and beauty whom she could not feign to despise. Birth is one cause, no doubt, though training and prosperity have come in aid of birth. In some of our older colonies, the people drew their ])lood from the very heart of England in her most heroic time and mood, when men who were born of gentle mothers flung themselves into the great adventure for establishing New States. The bands who came out under Raleigh's patent, under Brew- ster's guidance, were made up of soldiers, preachers, courtiers, gentlemen ; some coming hither to seek a fortune, others to find an asylum ; and though crowds of less noble emigrants followed after them — farmers, 272 NEW AMERICA. craftsmen, menials, moss-troopers, even criminals — the leaven was not wholly lost. The family names re- mained. Even now this older race of settlers keeps its force in some degree intact, making the women lovely, the men gallant and enduring, in the fashion of their ancient types. This higher range of female beauty, which is chiefly to be found in the older cities and in families of gentle race, is thoroughly English in its style ; reminding the stranger of a gallery of portraits in a country house ; here of Holbein and Lely, there of Gainsborough and Re^-nolds. Leslie, I think, brought some of his sweetest English faces from the United States. In many of the younger cities of the Union, there is also a great deal of beauty, backed by a good deal of wit and accomplishment ; but the beauty of these younger cities (at least that sample of it which I see here in Saratoga, and that which I saw a little while ago at Lebanon springs) is less like the art of Gains- borough and of Reynolds than that of Guido and of Greuse. Much Flemish blood is in it. The skin is fairer, the eye bluer, the expression bolder, than they are in the English type. ISTew York beauty has more dash and color; Boston beauty more sparkle and deli- cacy. Some men would prefer the more open and audacious loveliness of New York, with the Rubens- like rosiness and fullness of the flesh ; but an English eye will And more charm in the soft and shy expres- sion of the elder type. In E'ew York, the living is more splendid, the dressing more costly, the furnish- ing more lavish, than in New England; but the efiect of this magnificence, as an educating agent, is found to be rather upon the eye than upon the soul. May I illustrate my meaning by example? In Fifth Avenue you may find a mansion which has cost more money LADIES. 273 to build than Bridgewater House in London, and in which the wines and viands served to a guest may be as good as any put on an English board, but an Amer- ican would be the first to feel how wide an interval separated these two houses. One house belongs to wealth ; the other, to poetry. One boasts of having marble columns and gilded walls ; the other, of pos- sessing Raphael paintings and Shakspeare quartos. In Fifth Avenue there is a palace; in Cleveland liow there is a shrine. Some of this difference is what I find (or fancy) be- tween the beauties of Boston and Richmond and those of Washington and New York. Of course, I am not speaking of shoddy queens and petroleum empresses; these ladies make a class apart, who, even when they chance to live in Fifth Avenue, have no other relation to it than that of being there, like the hickories and limes. I speak of the real ladies of New York, wo- men who would be accounted ladies in Hyde Park, when I say that, as a rule, they have a style and bear- ing, a dash, a frankness, a confidence, not to be seen among their sisters of either New England or Old England. "I was very bad upon him ; but I got over it in time, and then let him off"," said a young and pretty woman of New York to a friend of mine, speak- ing of her love affairs, in the secrecy of a friendship which had lasted two long days. By Afm, she meant a swain whom she, in the wisdom of sixteen summers, had chosen from the crowd — one whom, if the whim had only held her a trifle longer, she might have made her husband by lawful rites. The girl was not a brazen minx, such as a man may sometimes see in a train, in a river boat, playing with big words and putting on saucy airs, but a sweet and elegant girl, a lady from brow to instep, with a fine carriage, a low voice, a cul- 274 NEW A3IERTCA. tured mind ; a piece of feminine grace, such as a man would like to have in a sister and strive to compass in a wife. Her oddity consisted, first, in the thing which she said ; next, in her choice of words ; in other phrase, it lay in the difference between an English girl's and an American girl's habits of thought with regard to the relations of men and women. "I was bad upon him, but I let him off," expresses, in very plain Saxon words, an idea which would hardly have entered into an English girl's mind, and, even if it had so entered, would never have found that dry and passionless escape from her lips. In that phrase lay hidden, like a pass-word in a com- mon saying, the cardinal secrets of American life : the scarcity of women in the matrimonial market, and the power of choosing and rejecting which that scarcity confers on a young and pretty girl. CHAPTER XXXVHI. SQUATTER WOMEN. The fruits of this excess of males over females in the American market are not confined to young damsels who flirt and pout in Saratoga, in I^ewport, and at the Falls; they come in equal harvests to the peasant girls of Omaha, St. Joseph, and Leavenworth. In the west- ern country, the excess of males is greater than it is in the eastern, with advantages to match on the part of our fairer sex. Among the many points of difference between life in SQUATTER WOMEN. 275 the Old World and life in the New, none comes more vividly to the eye than the daily contrast between the gait, dress, speech, and occupations of females in the lower ranks. If Fifth Avenue is a paradise for women, so, each in its own degree, is the mill, the ranch, the oil-spring, the rice-field, and the farm-yard. I am old enough to recall with a smile my boylike indignation when I first saw females laboring in the open countrj''; not with the men, their fathers and sweethearts, as they might do for a day of haymaking in my own Yorkshire ; but alone on the hillsides, in gangs and parties, gaunt and wasted things, ill-clad, ill-fed, pallid with toil, and scorched by the sun. This trial happened to me in beautiful Burgundy, on the slopes of sweet Tonnerre, to whiah I had gone in the heyday of youth, full of dreams and pastorals. Good old Josephine, poor little Fan, how my heart used to ache for you, as you trotted ofi:' in the early day, in your old flap hats, your thin calico skirts, and thick wooden clogs, with the rakes and hoes in your hands, the jar of fresh water on your heads, the basket of brown bread and onions on your arms, leaving that lazy old Jean, who called one of you wife, the other of you daughter, asleep in his crib ! How my fingers used to twitch and claw the air when, later in the day, the rascal would come out into the street, shake himself into good humor, gabble about the news, play his game of dominoes at the estaminet door, and enjoy his pipe of tobacco on the steps of St. Pierre ! Since that boyish day, I have seen the feminine serfs at their field-work in many parts of the earth; the Celt in Con- naught, the Iberian in Valentia, the Pawnee in Colo- rado, the Fellaheen in Egypt, the Valack in the Carpa- thian mountains, the Walloon in Flanders, the Negress in Kentucky; but I have never yet been able to look 276 NEW AMERICA. down on this grinding and defacing toil without flush- ing veins. After so much waste, it was rather comical to find Loo Sing making beds and Hop Chang washing clothes. Li my own country, the peasant girl is not every- thing that poets and artists paint her. In spite of our Mayday games, our harvest-homes, and many other country pastimes, relics of an older and a merrier age, the English peasant girl is a little loutish, not a little dull. As a rule, she is not very tidy in her person, not very neat in her dress, not very quick with her fingers, not very gainly on her feet. The American girl of the same rank in life is in every respect, save one, her superior. It may come from living in a softer climate, from feeding on a different diet, from inheriting a purer blood; but from whatever cause it springs, there can be no dispute about the fact, that in Lancashire and Devonshire, indeed, in every English shire, you find among the peasant women a degree of personal beauty nowhere to be matched, as a general rule, and on a -scale for comparison, in the United States. Many American girls are comely, many more are smart; but among the lower grades of women, there is no such wide and plentiful crop of rustic loveliness as an artist finds in England; the bright eyes, the curly locks, the rosy complexions, everywhere laughing you into pleasant thoughts among our Devonshire lanes and Lancashire streets. But then comes the balance of ac- counts. With her gifts of nature, our English rustic must close her book, in presence of her keen and natty American sister. A few weeks ago, I rode out with a friend to see Cyrus Smith, a peasant farmer, living in the neighbor- hood of Omaha. Omaha is a new city, built on the SQUATTER WOMEN. 277 Missouri ; a place that has sprung into life in a dozen years; and is growing up like a city in a fairy tale. Yesterday it had a hundred settlers, to-day it has a thousand, to-morrow it may have ten thousand. Twenty years ago, the Omaha Indians lodged under its wil- lovvs, and the king of that tribe was buried on horse- back, by the adjacent bank. Now, it is a city, with a railway line, a capital, a court-house, streets, banks, omnibuses, hotels. What Chicago is, Omaha threat- ens to become. Cyrus Smith is a small squatter, living near a tiny creek, in a log-hut, on a patch of forest land, which he has wrung from nature by the toil of his hand, the sweat of his brow. The shed is not big, the plot of land is not wide. Within a narrow compass, every- thing needful in the way of growing stuft' and rearing stock, for a family of young children, must be done; cows must be stalled, pigs littered, poultry fed. There is no wealth to spare in Smith's ranch; the fare is hard, the living is only from hand to mouth ; yet on the face of affairs, there is no black sign of poverty, of meanness, such as you would see about an Irish hovel, a Breton cabin, a Valack den. Walk up this garden way, through these natty little beds of fruit- trees, herbs, and flowers. This path might lead to a gentleman's villa; for the road is wide and swept, and neither sink nor cesspool, as in Europe, offends the eye. Things appear to have fallen into their proper places. The shed, if rough, is strong and snug; a rose, a ja- ponica, a Virginia creeper, climbing round the door. Inside, the house is so scrupulously clean, that you might eat your lunch as comfortably off its bare planks as you could from the shining tiles of a Dutch floor. The shelves are many, the pots and pans are bright. Something like an air of gentle life is about you; as 24 278 NEW AMU RICA. though a family of position, suddenly thrown upon its own resources, had camped out in the prairie, halting for a season on its march. In the little parlor, there is a vase of flowers, a print, a bust of Washington. You see at one glance that there is a bright and wholesome woman in this house. Annie Smith is the type of a class of women found in America — and in some parts of England — but no- where else. In station she is little above a peasant; in feeling she is little below a lady. She has a thousand tasks to perform : to light her fires, to wash and dress her children, to scrub her floor, to feed her pigs and fowls, to milk her cows, to fetch in herbs and fruits, to dress and cook the dinners, to scour and polish her pails and pans, to churn her butter and press her cheese, to make and mend the clothes; but she laughs and sings through these daily toils with such a gay humor, such a perfect taste, such an easy compliance, that her work seems like pleasure and her care like pastime. She is neatly dressed; beyond, as an English- man might think, her station in life, were it not that she wears her clothes with a perfect grace. Her hands feel soft as though they were cased all day in kid. Her manner is easy, her countenance bright. Her idiom, being that of her class, amuses a stranger by its un- conscious sauciuess of tone. But her voice is sweet and low, as becomes her sex, when her sex is at its best. Oddities of expression you will hear from her lips, profanities never. Dirt is her enemy; and her sense of decency keeps the whole homestead clean. She rises with the sun, oftentimes before the sun; her beds are spotless, her curtains and hangings like falling snow. A Sicilian crib, with sheets unwashed for a year, is a thing beyond her imagination to conceive. ISTo herding with the kine, no sleeping in the stable, so SQUATTER WOMEN. 279 common in France, in Italy, in Spain, is ever allowed to her son, to her servant, by Annie Smith. A Kentish barn in hop-time, a Caithness bothy in hay-time, would appear in her eyes to be the abomination of abomina- tions. Her chicks, her pigs, her cattle, are all penned up in their roosts, their styles, their sheds. A Munster peasant puts his pig under the bed, a Navarrese mule- teer yokes his team in the house, an Epirote herdsman feeds his goats in the ingle, and an Egyptian fellah takes his donkey into his room. But these dirty and indecent habits of the poor people in our lazy Old "World are not only unknown but incomprehensible to American women of the grade of Annie Smith. Another thing about her takes the eye ; the quality of her everyday attire. In England, our female rustics, from the habit of going to church on Sundays, have caught the custom of dressing themselves in better clothes on one day of the week than on the other six days. They have, in fact, their Sunday gowns, com- pared with which their ordinary wear is nothing but mops and rags. In these respects their sisters in Italy and France resemble them; the contadina having her festa boddice, the paysanne her saint's-day cap. The Suffolk farmer's wife, whom you see coming out of church to-day, her face bright with soap, her bonnet gay with ribbon, has no objection to be seen by you again to-morrow, grimy with dirt, and arrayed in patches. ISTot so in America; where Annie thinks it would be in bad taste for her to dress gaudily one day, and shabbily six days. True economy, she says, makes her dress herself cleanly and nattily, even when the materials of her gown are poor. One good suit is cheaper than two suits, though one of them may be coarse in texture and mean in make. Good dressing is a habit of the mind, not a question of the purse. 280 NEW AMEBIC A. Any woman with a needle in her hand may be tidily dressed. All round Smith's holding near Omaha lies a colony of bachelors; four men out of five in this territory being without a wife. Annie feels some influence from the common fact; her house is a pleasant center for the young; and as bachelors are apt to grow untidy in their ranches, she finds it pleasant fun to suggest without words the blessings which accrue to a man who is lucky enough to procure a wife. How sad to think that every man who may deserve it cannot win the prize ! CHAPTER XXXIX. FEMININE POLITICS. If all that I hear from the female politicians of these l^ew England States — particularly from those of beau- tiful Burlington — be true, the great reform coming forward in the United States is a moral and social change ; a reform of thought even more than of society; a change in the relations of man to woman, which is not unlikely to write the story of its progress on every aspect of domestic life. Compared with such a revolution, all other issues of right and wrong — bases of representation, negro sufirage, reconstruction. State rights, repudiation, and the like — are but the topics of a day, trifles of the vestry, accidents of time and place, in two words, parish politics. Domestic reform, when it comes at FEMININE POLITICS. 281 all, must be wide iu scope, grave in principle. The question now on trial in the United States is said by these female advocates of Equal Rights to be, in effect, neither more nor less than this: Shall our family life be governed in the future of our race by Christian law or by Pagan law ? We have had an old saying among us, that "a clever woman can make any man she pleases propose to marry her;" and this London phrase, I am told, has been very much the New York fact. In the face of our surplus million of spinsters, the saying is a pleasantry, as you may see at any crush- room, kettle-drum, and croquet party. Who does not know a hundred clever women, among the brightest of their sex, who are dropping down the stream, unbid- den to the church upon its banks ? If that saying about a clever woman being able to marry whom she pleased, were true, should we always hear it with a smile? "Who would risk meeting those clever women? " Come now, and bring the lady that owns you," were Lady Morgan's coquetting words to a friend whom she was coaxing to drop in upon one of her morning concerts. Yet the brilliant Irish lady wrote, that in all ages, in all climates, w^omen have behaved like saints, and been treated like serfs. It is not a female saying, that a woman can marry any one she likes. "Woman and her Master" gave a voice to that cry of the female heart, which has led London into found- ing a Ladies' College in a side street, a Ladies' Club over a pastry-cook's shop; which has helped ISTew York into calling congresses of maids and matrons on love, marriage, divorce, with the kindred topics of natural selection, artistic maternity, and the mediatorial privilege of the sex. It must be owned, that as yet our own female poli- 24** 282 NEW AMEBIC A. ticians have made but puny efforts to free themselves from the bonds of law. With us, Reform has' to wait on times and seasons. In English society, the mascu- line mind still bears the bell, and the most daring of her sex cannot hope, when she lays her hand on our forms and canons, to have the laughter on her side. She knows it will be against her. iS'ot so her American sister; come what may, the Vermont heroine, the JS^ew Hampshire reformer, has no dread of being baffled by a sneer. Mary Cragin may renounce her marriage vows, Anna Dickenson may mount the platform, Mary "Walker may put on pantalettes. What do they care for men's jests and gibes? Young girls being now in brisk demand, women are free from all fear of misad- venture and neglect, even though they should presume to look the great question of their destinies in the face. Prudence of the trading sort having no part in what these ladies may say and do, they are free to think of what is right in fact, of what is sound in law; to come together in public, to teach and preach, to defy the world, and to hold a parliament of their own. Why should they not? K men may meet in public to dis- cuss affairs, why may not women? Are parish politics more important to a people than domestic politics? No man with eyes and heart will say that everything in relation to our home affairs has yet been placed on a perfect footing — that justice everywhere reigns by the side of love — that behind the closed door, the cur- tained window, all the relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, are tempered and ennobled by a Christian spirit. If this cannot be said, with even a show of truth, then we have failed as yet to plant on our hearths the religion of love. And if we have failed in our attempt after a Christian life, why may not the reasons of our failure be asked in. a public place, in FEMININE POLITICS. 283 presence of those whom it concerns? But whether men may think it right or wrong to put such queries, American damsels have begun to think, to write, and to vote upon them. Domestic life is said to be woman's sphere; domestic reform, then, is feminine work. Some of these Vermont politicians have got far beyond writing and voting on domestic love. Oneida Creek and Salt Lake City — communities founded by Vermont men — are practical replies to the one great question of our day, — What shall be done to reform the abuses of our social and domestic life? All the ladies who have entered these lists in favor of their sex — who have begun to preach and write on woman's place in the household, on equality of male and female, on free trade in love, on slavery in mar- riage, on the right of divorce, on sexual resurrection — whether they lift up their voices with a Margaret Fuller at Brook Farm, a Mary Cragin at Oneida Creek, an Antoinette Doolittle at Mount Lebanon, a Belinda Pratt in Salt Lake City, an Eliza Farnham of New York — have gone back, in these debates, to the very first of First Principles: the absence of all guiding light, of all settled law, even of all safe tradition on the subject of domestic life, compelling them, in search of evidence, to question books, to waylay facts, to criticise codes. These ladies have entered on their task with spirit. ]^o sphere has been too high, no abyss has been too deep, for their prying eyes. They have soared to Olympus, they have plunged into Hades, in search of examples of the actual working of a law of love. They have turned to Syria and to Egypt, to Athens and to Rome; they have appealed to nature and to art, to poetry and to science; they have disputed the story of Eve, denied the wisdom of Lycurgus, in- vaded the seclusion of Sarah's tent. From every 284 NEW AAIERICA. country they have sought an argument, a warning, a reproof. They have gone down to the threshing-floor with lluth, they have read the story of Aspasia, they have dwelt on the fate of Lucretia, they have invoked the spirit of Jane Grey. In every land they have found a model and a moral; and though the model may vary with woman's height, and color, and educa- tion, the moral is said to be everywhere the same. Until the new era — which their newest prophetess, Eliza Farnham, has been good enough to describe as Woman's Era — dawned upon the sex in America, they have found that the female had been treated by the male, sometimes as a toy, often as a victim, gen- erally as a chattel, always as a slave. Where, they ask, in glancing through the story of our race, can a woman's eye find anything to admire? Let her pass into an Arab harem, into a Hindoo zenana, into a Kaffir krall, into a Xew York hotel, into a Pawnee wigwam, into a Mayfair house, and what will she find in these female cages? Equality of the sexes, freedom of the affections? Nowhere. East and west, north and south, she will find little more than government by the strong. As regards higher principles of order, she will see alike in the Christian house and in the heathen cave, the same confusion of ideas, the same difference of laws — the greatest confusion, the wildest divergence, being found, it is alleged by some, in the United States. In no country under heaven, say these female re- formers of domestic life, is the woman held equal to the man. An Arab is allowed to marry four wives; a Jew gives daily thanks that he was born a man; a Persian doubts, in spite of the Koran, whether his concubine has an^^ soul. Baron and feme, the lord FEMININE POLITICS. 285 and his woman, are the rough old English names of husband and wife. In America, in the midst of liberty and light, the station of woman has hardly been im- proved — if she measures the improvements by Christian lengths. At Onondaga, in New York, the principal people have petitioned the legislature in favor of abol- ishing all the laws against seduction. Even in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York, the most refined, the most wealthy societies of America, her position, say these female politicians, is little better than it is among the Perfectionists and Mormons, even when she has given herself to the man of her choice. See what she has to yield! She must give up to him her name; she must cease to be a citizen; she must transfer to him her house and land ; she must sink herself in her new lord. What more does the negress yield on being sold as a slave ? In legal jargon, the married lady becomes a feme covert ; a creature to be treated as an infant, who can hardly do either right or wrong; a change which, while shielding her on one side, robs her on the other of all her natural rights. No court, no canon, no society, does the woman justice. What is a wedding- ring but a badge? What is a harem but a prison? What is a house but a cage ? Why should man have the court, the camp, the grove, while woman has only love? Why should not girls aspire to shine in the senate, to minister in the church? Why may not Elizabeth Stanton represent New York in Congress? Why should not Olympia Brown have the charge of souls at Weymouth? Must women be condemned for- ever to suckle fools and chronicle small beer? Such ladies as Lucy rftone and Mary Walker put these queries to the world, while an army of wives and maidens waits for its reply. 286 NEW AMEBIC A. The very names which the two sexes use toward each other in wedlock imply, it is alleged, the rela- tions of lord and slave. Husband means master; wife means servant. In many parts of America, as in England north of the Trent, a woman of the lower classes never speaks of her husband otherwise than as her "master;" and a husband of the same parts, in the same class, would never talk of his wife except as his "woman;" when he would let you see that he pets her, as his " little woman," Are these relations, ask indignant Eliza Farnham, persuasive Caroline Dall, to be the lasting bases of the married state in a free, a pacitic, and a religious land? No other topic ever did, no other topic ever will, ex- cite in the human breast so keen a curiosity as the relations of man to woman, of woman to man ; two bright and plastic beings, unlike in form, in genius, and in office ; yet linked by nature in the strongest bonds ; fated, as the case may be, to make each other either supremely wretched or supremely blest. Society is the fruit of these relations. Law is but a name for the order in which they exist. Poetry is their audible voice. All epics, tragedies, and stories rest upon them, as the fountains of our nobler and our finer passions. From these relations spring our highest love and our sternest hate. Minor dramas play themselves out. Simpler problems get themselves solved. To wit : the rules which govern the relations of man with man — whether as prince and subject, priest and laic, father and son, creditor and debtor, master and slave — are found to have been obeying for ages a certain law of growth, which has been softening them, until the old, harsh spirit of pagan law has been all but wholly cast out of our daily life. Is it the same with those rules FEMININE POLITICS. 287 which govern the more delicate relations of man with woman? In no very large degree. Is it not a sad, surprising fact, that in the nineteenth century of gospel light, the laws under which women are compelled to live in wedlock should be worse in America than they are in Asia ? In Turkey, marriage makes a bond woman free; in the United States (if we believe these champions of Equal Rights), it turns a free woman into a slave. In the East, polygamy is dying out ; the only quarter in which it is being revived is the West. Is it true that our domestic affections lie beyond the sphere of law? Men like John H. Noyes, women like Harriet Holton, say so boldly; and at Wallingford and Oneida Creek, the sexes have deposed all human codes and agreed to live with each other by the light of grace. But this opinion, with the practice which depends upon it, is the fancy of a small, though an active and seducing school. The world thinks otherwise; for the world be- lieves in a law of God, even though it may have ceased to confide in a law of man. 288 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER XL. HUSBANDS AND WIVES. About the main facts which lie at the root of this feminine discontent with existing rules, there is hardly any debate among men of sense. All who have eyes to see, admit them. When you enter upon a study of that nameless science, so often in our thoughts, which may be called the Comparative Anatomy of Domestic Life, you are certainly met on the threshold of inquiry by the astounding fact, that the rights of woman in wedlock would seem to have had scarcely any connection with the scheme of Christian progress. All other rights appear to increase with time. The subject wins concessions from his prince ; the layman rises to the level of his priest ; the child obtains pro- tection against his sire ; the debtor secures some jus- tice from his creditor; the slave is freed from his owner ; but hardly any change in her condition, hardly any improvement in her standing, comes to the wedded wife. As a mere chattel, a damsel may be safe ; as a wedded wife, the mistress of a home, the law takes hardly any note of her existence ; even after all the changes wrought by a dozen years of reform, the law may be described as almost blind to her sufferings, deaf and dumb to her appeals. When you compare the relations of man with man, and of man with woman, in Asia and America, you are struck at every turn by unsuspected contrasts. Whether you look on man as a citizen, as a laic, as a son, as a debtor, as a servant, you find him better HUSBANDS AND WIVES. 289 placed before the law in America than in Asia. Could a fellah in Damascus dare to say in a rich man's pres- ence, "I am as good as you? " Could the ryot of Luckuow answer to his lord, "Go to, my vote is as good as yours, and I will not serve you ? " Would not such an offender be dispatched to the gateway and punished with twenty stripes ? But is there any such difference between Damascus and Boston, between Lucknow and Philadelphia, in respect of the relation of man with woman ? Not at all. The contrast lies another way ; for in Turkey, in Persia, in Egypt, in Mohammedan India, the privileges of married women stand on a surer footing as to justice than they do in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. If you doubt this fact, take down from your shelves the Hidayah, that legal code which an English lawyer has to administer in our Indian courts, and your doubts will pass away into quaint surprise. On opening the Hidayah, you will tind that the harem life, which many of those who have never seen it are content to picture as a drama of poisons, bowstrings, slaves, and eunuchs, is guarded and secured, so far as the females go, by a host of wise and compassionate rules, which are not to be broken with impunity by the stronger sex. Many persons here in Boston imagine that a harem is a jail, an Oriental wife a slave ; though a very slight acquaintance with Mohammedan law would show them that an English wife is far worse off as a woman than any of her swarthy sisters of Egypt and Bengal. In one short chapter of a dozen pages, Blackstone set down in his Commentaries all that he conld find in our books about the legal relations of an English husband to the woman whom he makes his wife. In the Hidayah (Arabic Commentaries) the chapters which 290 NEW AMERICA. contain the rules defining the relations of a Moslem husband to his Moslem wife, are long enough to fill a volume. A ISTew England advocate of Equal Rights for the two sexes, would describe our English code — and after it the American code — as making a free woman into a serf by the machinery of a civil con- tract and a solemn right ; in some respects as worse than into a serf, since, by the mere act of marriage, it cancels all the rights to which she may have been born, takes away her family name, disposes of her goods and lands, and gives her person into the power of a man who maj^ squander her fortune and break her heart. How far would such a description by the New England advocate be unfair? Who does not know that such cases may be occurring in any town ? We need not look for examples in the divorce courts : — they meet us in these streets, they cry aloud to us from these balconies. Our common law gives up the wife so thoroughly into her husband's power, that a woman, who comes to the altar young, confiding, beautiful, and rich, may be compelled by brutal treat- ment, for which the law can give her no redress, to quit it, after a dozen years, an outraged woman with a ruined fortune and a wasted frame. One course, and one only, can save her from the risk of these evils: — a settlement made on her account with the law before she has entered on the fatal right. Nothing so gross and cruel towards a young and loving girl could happen in either Turkey, Persia, or Mohammedan India. In a Moslem country, every right which a female, whether rich or poor, enjoys by her birth, remains with her, a sacred property, to her death. No man can take it from her. After she has passed from her father's house into her husband's home, she is still a citizen, a proprietor, a human HUSBANDS AND WIVES. 291 being. She can sue her debtors, and recover her own in the open courts. All the privileges which belong to her as a woman and as a wife are secured to her, not by the courtesies that come and go, but by actual text in the book of law. A Moslem marriage is a civil act, needing no mollah, asking no sacred phrase. Made before a judge, it may also be unmade before a judge. But the Eastern contract is in this respect more logical than the Western contract, that it gives to the man no power upon the woman's person beyond what the law defines, and none whatever upon her lands and goods. A Persian, a Turkish bride, being married to a man of her own rank and creed, retains in the new household which she enters to become the soul, her separate existence as her father's child, A New England bride, on being married to a man of her own rank and creed, becomes lost in him. A Turkish wife is an independent and responsible person, know- ing what is right and wrong, and with the same faculty of receiving and devising property which she held in her spinster days. What is hers is not her lord's. She may sue her debtor, without the concurrence of her nearest friend. She may receive a pension, sign a bond, execute a trust. Compared against her Asiatic sister, what a helpless being an American lady seems ! The very first lesson, then, to be drawn from this study of the Comparative Anatomy of Domestic Life, is that rules of law are not beyond some sort of fair and equal application, even in the midst of those secrecies which feed, and those sanctities which guard, the love of husband and wife. Such rules of law are found in Asia, They exist in Cairo, in Bagdad, in Delhi, in a hundred cities of the East. Our own magistrates have to take account of them in India; where the most intricate questions of domestic right, 292 yEW AMEBIC A. — questions relating to dowry, to divorce, to prefer- ence, to maintenance, to conjugal fidelity, are brought before the courts, and require to be considered and decided on principles utterly unknown in Westminster Hall. In dealing with such cases between man and woman, we have to lay aside our Statutes at large, our civil law and common law; to forget our jargon of baron and feme, covert and sole. The Suras of Mo- hammed supply us with the principles, the Commen- taries of Abu Yusuf with the details, of a practicable Moslem code. Who, then, in the face of our large Indian experience, will be bold enough to say, that law cannot be made to reach the innermost recesses of a household ? In Delhi, in Lucknow, in Madras, not to speak of Cairo, of Damascus, of Jerusalem, law penetrates to the nursery and to the bridal cham- ber. Of course, there may be secret tyrannies in Asia, as there may be in America; violence of the strong against the weak may be fierce as the passion, subtle as the genius, of an Oriental race ; but the ex- cesses of a Moslem husband find no sanction either in the silence or in the provisions of his actual code. If he does wrong, he does it as wrong, and with the fear of punishment in his heart. When a man commits an abuse of the harem, however trifling, he knows that for the victim of his temper there is a swift and sure appeal to an impartial judge. But how, it may be asked, does a married woman come to have a higher security against oppression in an Asiatic city than in American cities ? Surely it cannot be because those Asiatic cities are Moslem in creed, while these American cities are Christian? Nothing in our Gospel makes a Christian wife a slave; and in its sweet tenderness to woman, the Gospel stands high above the Koran, high above every other DOMESTIC LAW. 293 book. Why, then, is the law of Christendom so harsh to wedded women, while that of Islam appears to be 80 mild ? This question goes deep down into the roots of things, and a full answer to it would supply the motto for that revolution which the female politicians declare to be coming upon American social life. CHAPTER XLI. DOMESTIC LAW. "When the New England seeker after better things than she can find just now in a woman's lot, turns aside, with her aching heart, from the wrongs of time towards the promise of a golden age of justice, in she knows not what new cities of Bethlehem, Wallingford, Lebanon, Salt Lake, the sites of her new experiments in living, no man will say that she is troubled without cause. Let her remedy be sought in the right place or in the wrong, the evil is dark and vast ; pervading the whole community, and passing in its degrees of shame, from the delicate tortures of the boudoir down to the rough brutalities of the street. Even here in Boston, with all its learning, all its refinement, all its piety, the wrongs of women are so gross, that Caroline Ball confessed to a female audience she could neither lay them bare nor speak of them by their proper names. Yet on all these suff'erings of the weaker sex, the American law is silent, the American magis- trate is powerless. How, ask the reformers, have these evils grown upon us? 25* 294 NEW AMERICA. Tliat prior question of how it has come to pass that a Turkish, Persian, Egyptian lady enjoys in marriage a securer state than her paler sister of Boston, Kich- mond, New Orleans, would open up for us a glimpse of some forgotten truths ; since it would start a second question, — How have we Christians come by our marriage laws, and how have the Mohammedan na- tions come by theirs? The answer is not far away; for the facts are written broadly in our histories, mi- nutely in our statutes. We get our marriage laws from the Pandects ; the Moslems get theirs from the Koran. In this dift'ereuce of origin lies the secret of their difference in tone and spirit. Our laws have a civil and commercial source ; theirs have a moral and religious source. Here, indeed, an inquirer strikes his axe upon the root. Our life is a divided duty : a moral life based on the Gospel, a family life based on the civil law. While our morals have their root in Christianity, our statutes have their root in Paganism. And thus it is, in the main degree at least, that woman's griefs in marriage, and in all the relations of sex and sex, have come upon her, like many other evils in our social body, from the fact of our deriving our morals from one source, the Gospels, our laws from another source, the Pandects, One of the sorry jests in which we are apt to array our falsehoods, says that our English and American codes of law are founded on the precepts of our faith. Let us try this dogma by a test. A just and pious man, fresh from his study of Holy Writ, shall walk with the Bible in his hand, into the Supreme Court of the United States, and shall then and there try to per- suade the presiding judge that the Sermon on the Mount is good American law, binding on every DOMESTIC LAW. 295 follower of Christ. Have you any kind of doubt as to what would become of that just and pious man ? You know that the judge would pity, the advocate quiz, the audience mock, and the officer seize him. Re- move the scene from the Capitol at "Washington, to the gateway of Damascus. In the Oriental city, such a man might go before the cadi, Koran in hand, assured that his citations from the holy book would be heard ; and if his views of them were sound, that they would govern the verdict to be given. And the reason is plain. An Oriental has not two laws : one for the street, another for the gate ; one for his harem, a second for his mosque. His moral life and his civil life have one source, one end, and he finds no war between the teachings of his cadi and his priest. In Boston, in IsTew York, we have a moral code which only on two or three points of moment approaches the edge of our domestic code. What do our judges know of Christ, of Moses, and of Abraham ? As lawyers, nothing. These names are not among those which may be quoted in our acts and commentaries. The judges who dispense our law have heard of Jus- tinian, of the civilians ; but of the immutable precepts of our faith, the divine foundations of our moral life, they are powerless, as magistrates on the bench, to take any public and judicial note. They must abide by the text, a mixture of the Saxon common law and of the Roman civil law. A prime result of our laws being Pagan while our morals are Christian, is the fact, so strange and be- wildering to an Oriental, that, with us, the practice of virtue is regarded as a private affair, a thing between a man and his Maker only, not, as with the Moslems, between a man and his fellow. Thus, in Boston, in New York, no law compels a man to be chaste, com- 296 NEW AMERICA. passionate, dutiful. One of those wits who speak truth in jests and parables, has said that, in our societ}^ a rich, unscrupulous sinner may contrive to break every commandment in the decalopjue, without losing his place either at good men's feasts or in ladies' cabinets. If he is great in evasion, pleasant in manner, choice in hospitality, he may run the whole round of offence, from following false gods to coveting his neighbor's wife. His only art is to avoid being seen by the police. Is that parable untrue ? What man who drives in Fifth Avenue, who walks on yon common, shuts his eyes on the world so far as to dream that our manners are all alike ? You need not be a cynic to see that fashion sits down to its meat and wine, day after day, year after year, with wretches who, in any part of Islam, would be taken before the cadi and beaten on the feet. With two exceptions, perhaps, a sinner may break the ten commandments openl}^, in these public streets, and no one shall lay hands upon him. While he refrains from killing his foe and robbing his friend, he is safe. What magis- trate on the bench would think of asking whether a man accused before him bowed to a false god, put away graven images from his house, abstained from the use of oaths, kept holy the Sabbath day, honored his father and mother, respected the purity of his neighbor's wife, drove out the sin of covetousness from his soul ? ISTot one. And why ? Because the magistrate in his office on the bench is the minister, not of our moral system, but of our civil code. The truth is, we English and Americans have hardly yet embraced Christianity as a scheme of life. We find our religion at church, and when we have sung our psalms and breathed our prayers, we go back DOMESTIC LAW. 297 into the streets to be governed for another week by our pagan law. Our courts of justice have no authority to notice moral oifences, unless they happen to have been injurious to a fellow-citizen in either his peace or his purse. Mere lack of honor, virtue, reverence, goes on our bench for nothing. A wretch may curse his parents, may profane the Sabbath, may worship stocks and stones, without earning for himself the penalty of a stripe. The same wretch may break his wife's heart, may squander his child's estate, may destroy his friend's happiness, yet he shall escape all punishment of his crimes. Some of the darkest transgressions in the sight of God — the God whose will we obey — are treated by the code under which we live, as of no more moment than the whimsies of a child. Fornication is not condemned. Seduction is treated as a wrong done, not to the girl, who may be its victim, but only to the owner of her service. Adultery is classed with such small injuries as theft; a loss of property rather than of purity and credit ; and the man whose name may have been tarnished for- ever by a seducer, must plead against the destroyer of his peace, not his outraged honor, but the loss of his daughter's service, of his wife's society. In some of the United States, they have gone a little way towards rounding off these lines of separation between Chris- tian morals and the civil code. In ISew York, a fellow may be lodged in jail for seducing girls ; but the legislatures have hardly, as yet, even touched the fringe of a mighty evil. Those Onandago reformers of the law who petitioned in favor of replacing the felon's cell by a bridal wreath — going back to the prosaic plan of considering the act of seduction as an act of marriage — have no remedy to suggest for the still darker outrage of seducing and debauching a 298 ^EW AMERICA. married woman. ISTor can they find one under a law which treats the crimes of seduction and adultery as a wrong to the man's estate, but not to his moral life. In all the advancing schools of American thought, this topic is discussed, the evil is admitted, a remedy is sought. At Oneida Creek they have put an end to adultery by abolishing marriage. At Mount Lebanon they have done the same thing by prohibiting love. At Salt Lake, again, they have checked the evil by punishing adultery with death. But these sectional trials leave the law intact, and the courts and legisla- tures of the Union are continually being vexed by petitions in favor of substituting some higher rule for the one in vogue. Will they ever find such a rule while they cling to the code of Justinian in preference to the word of God ? In a Moslem country, the Prophet's word is law, each line a command, each sura an institute. The Prophet's object being, according to his lights, to pro- mote among his people not only the public peace, but holy living; his precepts were adapted to the regula- tion of every act of a believer in the harem, in the mosque, in the bazaar. On the other side, our Saviour's word has only obtained in our western society the force of a moral precept, which every one may adopt, and every one may reject, at pleasure. Again, our pagan statutes seem to have been framed for service onlj^ in the public streets. We have a say- ing that our bouse is our castle; it is so sometimes, in a wide and wicked sense. No writ runs in it. Law pauses at the threshold ; and the crown itself, the majesty of public right, can only break those portals after due solemnities and in the wake of some atro- cious crime. In a Moslem harem, no such feudal se- crecy is found. Every room in a house is open to the DOMESTIC LAW. 299 Koran ; every act of the lord must be conformable to rule ; and a man's wife, his child, his slave, may cite the Koran against him. In Islam, every one knows the law by heart ; the Koran being a text which can never fall out of date. All Moslem jurists muFt adopt this text, which they are only free to expound within certain limits, and every cadi may go back to the original in his day of doubt. The basis of public justice is the same in every age and in every land. In states like England and America, we have no great body of divine, indisputable law, by which all queries might be answered, all problems might be solved. When a case arises in our courts, which no enact- ment appears to meet, where do our judges look for guidance 't Do they turn to the Gospels. Do they read St. Paul ? They never think of such a course. The Gospels make no part of our legal store. If we teach the decalogue in our infant-schools, and preach it in our chapels, we make no use of it in our law courts. Proud, as it would seem, of our Pagan code, which puts so much of our conduct into contrast with our. creed, we make a boast of this freedom from re- straint, and only on our grand occasions, as it were, admit the presence in our midst of a purer law. Now it is one of the open facts of our modern soci- eties in London and New York, that a woman's rank in the family is either high or low according to the loyalty with which we follow that Gospel law of love which the courts of justice may, if they please, ignore. A Turk is not permitted by the cadi to set aside /w's Sermon on the Mount as a precept for Sundays, for good women, for men in childhood and old age. Even in the privacy of his harem, an Asiatic is gov- erned by some kind of moral and religious rules; while an American is governed in his home only by 300 ^"^W AMEBIC A. legal and commercial precepts, from which every moral and religious feeling may have been utterly divorced. Thus it happens that an Oriental wife, though she ma}^ be living in the state of polygamy, has in some capital points a wider freedom in her circle than the most highly cultured lady of New York. Is that the end of our long endeavor after a Chris- tian life ? N'o religious man or woman thinks so ; and at this moment a thousand busy brains and gen- tle hearts are working on the problem of our passage from this stage of growth into a religion of higher truth. Some of these seekers after better things may be groping in the dark ; looking for light where light is not ; but in so far as they are seeking honestly and with earnest heed to get into the better way, they deserve our study and respect. Foremost among these seekers after light, are the Brethren of Mount Lebanon in the State of New York. MOUNT LEBANON. 301 CHAPTER XLII. MOUNT LEBANON. On a sunny hill-side, three miles south of New Lebanon Springs, (a watering-place in the upper country of the lovely river Hudson, at which idlers from New York and Massachusetts spend the hot weeks of summer, lounging in frame sheds, flirting under chestnuts, driving over broken roads, sipping water from the well, — which a negro has just told me that a horse may drink without doing itself any harm !) stands a group of bu-ildings, prim and yet pic- turesque; the chief home of a religious body, small in number, singular in dress and in ideas, and only to be found, as yet, in the United States. This village is Mount Lebanon, the chief home and centre of a celibate people, founded by Ann Lee ; knoAvn to scoifers as a comic institution unattached, under'the name of the Shaker Village ; Shaker being a term of mockery and reproach, like most of our reli- gious names; one which the members meekly accept, and of which they are shyly proud. Among the elect they are known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Needing a little rose-water, I asked a friend where the best might be got. "You must apply," he said, " at any of the stores where they sell Shaker scents." Li quiring about the best place for collecting Ameri- can shrubs and flowers, my companion said, "You must ride over to Mount Lebanon, as no one in either New York or Massachusetts can match the Shakers in producing seeds and plants," My curiosity was 302 NEW AMERICA. piqued. Why should the villagers of Mount Lebanon excel the rest of their countrymen in such an art? Of course, I knew that the Essenes were florists and seedsmen, as well as rearers of bees and growers of herbs and corn : but then those Hebrew anchorites lived in a time when husbandry was contemned a& a servile art, unfit to occupy the thoughts, to engage the hands of free men; and they gave themselves up to a life of field labor, not for the profits wiiich it might bring them, but as an exercise of the spirit and a trial of the flesh. In the neighborhood of Mount Leba- non, — a ridge of wooded hills, furrowed with bright dales and glades, and with tiny becks of water run- ning east and south from the Springs, — no man af- fects to despise farming as a lowly craft, the work of women and slaves ; on the contrary, all the best tal- ents of this region are invested in the land ; and re- nown of its kind lies in waiting for the man who shall produce from his acres the finest and moat am- ple crops. " Why, then," I asked my friend, "where all are striving to excel in the art of producing plenty from the soil, should the Shakers of Mount Lebanon be the only seedsmen in the State?" "Guess," said he, after a moment's thought, "it is because they give their minds to it." This saying about the Shakers giving their minds to the culture of land may be used as a key to unlock nearly all the secrets of Mount Lebanon. As you climb up this green hill-side from the pretty hamlet of New Lebanon, you may see in the clean roads, in the bright swards, in the trim hedges, more than all else, in the fresh meek faces of men and girls, and in the strange sad light of their loving eyes, how much has been done in a few short years towards converting this corner of New York State from a MOUNT LEBANON. 303 rugged forest, the haunt of Iroquois and Lenni Le- nape, into the likeness of an earthly Eden. The rough old nature shows itself near. Yon crests and tops are clothed in their primeval woods, though the oaks and chestnuts are now in their second growth. Rocks crop out, and stones lie about you. Much of the land has never been reclaimed. The paths are all open ; and every man with a gun may shoot down game, as freely as he might in the prairies of Ne- braska. But the hand of man has been laid on the soil with a tight, though a tender grasp ; doing its work of beauty, and calling forth beauty in exchange for love and care. Where can you find an orchard like this young plantation on our left? Where, save in England, do you see such a sward? The trees are greener, the roses pinker, the cottages neater, than on any slope. JSTew Lebanon has almost the face of an English valley, rich with the culture of a thousand years. You see that the men who till these fields, who tend these gardens, who bind these sheaves, who train these vines, who plant these apple- trees, have been drawn into putting their love into the daily task ; and you hear with no surprise that these toilers, ploughing and planting in their quaint garb, consider their labor on the soil as a part of their ritual, looking upon the earth as a stained and de- graded sphere, which they have been called to redeem from corruption and restore to God. The plan, the life, the thought of Mount Lebanon are written in its grassy streets. This large stone building on your right — an edifice of stone in a region of sheds and booths — is the granary; a very fine barn, the largest (I am told) in America; a cow-shed, a hay- loft, a store-house, of singular size and happy contriv- ance; and its presence here, on a high place, in the 304 NEW AMEBIC A. gateway, so to speak, of the community, is a typical fact. The Granary is to a Shaker what the Temple was to a Jew. Beyond the barn, in the green lane, stands ITorth House, the dwelling of Elder Frederick and Elderess Antoinette (in the world they would be called Fred- erick W. Evans, and Mary Antoinette Doolittle), co- heads of this large family in the Shaker Society. Below their house, among the shrubs and gardens, lies the Visitors' house, in which it has been my fortune to spend, with Frederick and Antoinette, a few sum- mer days. Around these buildings rise the sheds and stores of the family. Next come a host of gardens, in which the Baltimore vine runs joyously up poles and along espaliers; then the church lying a little way back from the road, a regular white frame of wood, plain as a plank, with a boiler roof, a spacious, airy edifice, in which the public service of the society is sung, and danced on Sunday, to the wondering delight, often the indecent laughter of a crowd of idlers from the Springs. !Near by stands Church House, of which Elder Daniel and Elderess Polly (in the world Daniel Grossman and Polly Reed) are the co-heads; with the school, the store, at which pretty trumperies are sold to the Gentile belles. Beyond these buildings, higher up the hill, stand South House, East House, and some other houses. In all these dwellings live families of Shakers. Elder Frederick is the public preacher; but every family has its own male, its own female head. One family lives at Canaan, seven miles distant, to which I have made a separate visit ; while just beyond* the crest of yon hill, in the State of Massachusetts, you find another society — the settlement of Hancock. No Dutch town has a neater aspect, no Moravian MOUNT LEBANON. 305 hamlet a softer husli. The streets are quiet; for here you have no grog-shop, no beer-liouse, no loek-up, no pound ; of the dozen edifices rising about you — work- rooms, barns, tabernacle, stables, kitchens, schools, and dormitories — not one is either foul or noisy; and every building, whatever may be its use, has something of the air of a chapel. The paint is all fresh ; the planks are all bright ; the windows are all clean. A white sheen is on everything ; a happy quiet reigns around. Even in what is seen of the eye and heard of the ear, Mount Lebanon strikes you as a place where it is al- ways Sunday. The walls appear as though they had been built only yesterday; a perfume, as from many unguents, floats down the lane; and the curtains and the window-blinds are of spotless white. Everything in the hamlet looks and smells like household things which have been long laid up in lavender and rose- leaves. The people are like their village; soft in speech, demure in bearing, gentle in face; a people seeming to be at peace, not only with themselves, but with nature and with heaven. Though the men are oddly attired — in a sort of Arab sack, with a linen collar, and no tie, an under vest buttoned to the throat and falling below the thighs, loose trousers rather short, and broad-brimmed hat, nearly always made of straw, — they are grave in aspect, easy in manner, with no more sense of looking comic in the eyes of strangers than either an English judge on the bench or an Arab sheikh at his prayer. The women are habited in a small muslin cap, a white kerchief wrapped round the chest and shoulders, a sa: its institutions. "Ha!" roared Noyes, the idol- POLITICS. 453 breaker, " do you fanc}^ that heaven is a republic, that a majority governs in the skies, that angelic offices are elective, that God is a president, that His ministers are responsible to a mob?" And the crowds who heard him, answered — No! In the church it was much the same as in the political field. That old and stately church which has the root of its life in the mother country, has long ago ceased to he the popular church of America, if numbers may be taken as a certain test of power ; but even this church of an upper class, of an aristocracy, rich, decorous, educated, had not been able wholly to escape that rage for rending and dividing which pos- sessed its neighbors. The preachers struck, so to speak, for higher wages ; when some of the laymen, hurt by a display of worldly motives closely akin to those which govern affairs in Wall Street, quitted their fold for that of the Bible Communist, that of the Shaker, that of the Universalist. The "Wesleyan body, numerically the largest church in these States, parted into two great sects — a Meth- odist Episcopal Church North, and a Methodist Epis- copal Church South ; a division which was provoked, not caused, by the importance just then suddenly ac- quired by the negro question. In the northern section of the Methodist church, there was a further trouble and a second split, on account of conscientious scru- ples as to bishops' powers and laymen's rights ; the latter point being mainly raised on the question whether Methodist laymen might sell rum. A new religious body, now of very great strength, the Wesleyan Meth- odist Church in the United States, grew out of this secession. Indeed, eight or nine sects have been formed out of the original church of Wesley and Whitfield, 454 ^^W AMEBIC A. without counting those sececlers who have gone out bodily from the rest. j^ext in importance as to numbers come the Bap- tists ; a body, Hke the Methodists, fired with holy zeal ; which was found strong before the world, the flesh, the devil, yet weak in the presence of this seceding spirit. In a very short time this body was divided into Old School Baptists (called by their enemies Anti- effort Baptists), Sabbatarians, Campbellites, Seventh- day German Baptists, Tankers, Free-will Baptists, with their sub-section of Free Baptists ; and into some minor parties. In the Congregational Church, which prides itself on holding in its ranks the most highly educated min- isters and professors in the United States, there arose endless divisions, including Millennialists, Taylorites, and the strange heresy of the Perfectionists, founded by one of their students at Yale College. From the Millennialists, who fancied the world was about to end and the judgment to come, sprang the Millerites, Avho said it would end on a particular day. The Perfec- tionists, who declared that the world was already at an end, that the judgment had come down upon us, parted into Putneyites and Oberlinites ; sects which threw dirt upon each other, and laughed and mocked when any of their opposing brethren fell into sin. A great unrest invaded the retreat of the Moravian village of Bethlehem, in the pretty Lehigh mountains ; where young men took to questioning book and law; until the Moravians of Pennsylvania lost some customs which had hitherto marked them as a peculiar church. No sect escaped this rage for separation, for inde- pendence, for individuality; neither Unitarian, nor Omish, nor River Brethren, nor Winebrennarians, nor Swedenborgians, nor Schwenkfelders. Perhaps the POLITICS. 455 Come-outers may be taken as the final fruit of this seceding spirit; since they separated themselves from the older churches, from the dead and dying churches, as they call them, for secession's sake, and solely in the hope of breaking down the religious bodies in which they had been reared. These Come-outers have two articles of faith: one social, one dogmatic; they believe that man and woman are equal, and that all the churches are dead and damned. Society had to go through these trials ; and she cannot be said to have got through her maladies with- out many a wound and scar; since, in the slackening of all ties and ligatures, men had begun to toy with some of her most sacred truths. Property was at- tacked. In the press, and in the pulpit, it was said that all private wealth was stolen frem the general fund, that no one had a right to lay up riches, that no man could pretend to the exclusive holding in either wife or child. Doctors took up their parable against the sanctity of marriage ; women began to doubt whether it was well for them to love their husbands and to nurse their children. Some ladies set the fashion of laughing at mothers ; nay, it became in Boston, Richmond, and New York, a sign of high breeding to be known as a childless wife. Wretches arose in every city in the land, some of them men, more of them women, who professed to teach young wives, the secret arts by which it is said, that in some old countries, such as France, the laws of nature have often been set aside. Many a great house is shown in New York, in which resided creatures of the night wdio imported into America this abominable trade. Religion, science, history, morality, were thrust aside by these reformers, as clogs on individual liberty. What was a canon, a commandment, to a man resolved 456 NEW A ME RICA. on testing everything for himself? Excess of freedom led a few to Communism, a few into Free-love. What, in truth, is this dogma of perfect freedom, except the right of every man to have his own will done, even though his will should take the form of wishing to possess his neighbor's house and his neighbor's wife? Some of these brave reformers, like Noyes and ]SIalian, seized a religious feeling as the groundwork for their faith ; others again, like the Owenites and Fourierites, made a scientific axiom serve their turn; while yet a third and more poetic class,, the enthusiasts of Brook Farm, embraced a mystical middle term, making a god of l^ature and of Justice. All these schools of practical socialists seceded from the world, renouncing in terms, either express or tacit, their allegiance to the United States. What noble spirit, it was said, could suffer itself to be enslaved by canons, dogmas, precedents, and laws? Every man was now to be a law unto himself. Lib- erty was to have its day. The final stage of freedom, as it verges into chaos, is the stage in which no one has any rights left him to enjoy ; and in many parts of America this stage of progress had, on the evening of the War, been nearly reached. Family life was hardly less disturbed by this intrud- ing spirit of separation ; disputes, arising on the do- mestic hearth, being carried into public meetings and female congresses, held to debate the most fanciful points of diflerence between male and female, husband and wife, parent and child. W^omen raised their voices against nursing babies, against the sanctity of wedlock, against the permanence of marriage vows. They asserted rights which would have grieved and puzzled such models of their sex as Lad}- Rachel Ilussel and Lady Jane Grey. Caroline Dall demanded NOR TE AND SOU TH. 457 that woman should have the right to hibov in any pro- fession she might care to adopt. Margaret Fuller taught her female readers to expect equality in the married state. Mary Cragin preached the doctrine of Free-love for woman, and practised what she preached. Eliza Farnham urged a revolt of woman against man, declaring that the female is intrinsically nobler than the male. What a glorious strength of constitution this young society must have had to endure with so little waste the shock of so many forces ! What energy, what solidity, what stamina in the young Saxon republic! CHAPTER LXIII. NORTH AND SOUTH. If the negro question lent a pretext to the rage of North and South, the cause of that strife in Charleston harbor which brought on civil war, lay closer to the core of things than any wish on the part of these Southern gentry to maintain their property in slaves. The negro was a sign, and little more. Even that broader right of a State to live by its own lights — to make and unmake its laws — to widen or contract its enterprise — to judge of its own times and seasons — to act either with or without its fellow States — was but a pretext and a cry. The causes which have whit- ened these Virginia battle-fields (in the midst of which I write) lay deeper still. A planters' war could not have lived a month, a seceders' war could not have 39 458 NUW A ME BIG A . lived a year. The lists were drawn in another name, the passions welled from a richer source. No such beggarly stake as either of these engaged a million of English brothers in mortal strife. But when did nations ever close in combat with the actual cause of war emblazoned on their shields ? Nations have a way of doing great things on poor grounds ; of checking Russia in the name of the silver key, of making Italy on account of one hasty word. Men are the same in every clime. The prize for which the South contended against the North, was nothing less than the Principle of National Life. What idea should lie at the root of all social habits, all political creeds, in this great republic ? In the con- stitution, itself a compromise, the make-shift of a day, this question had been left an open gap. Every year had seen that opening widen ; and sagest men had often said, that such a question never could be closed, except in the old way, by a sovereign act of sacrifice. On one side of a faint and failing line lay these Southern States, peopled for the most part by a race of Cavaliers ; men brave and haughty, the representatives of privilege, education, chivalry ; a class in whom the graces which come of birth, of culture, of command, had been developed to a high degree. On the other side of that line, lay yon Northern States, peopled for the greater part by men of Puritan descent ; shrewd merchants, skilful artisans, the representatives of genius, enterprise, equality ; a class in whom the vir- tues which spring from faith, ambition, and success, were all but universal. Here stood the lotus-eater, with his airs and lan- guors, his refinements and traditions ; there stood the craftsman, with his head full of ideas, his heart full of faith, his arm full of strength. Which was to give the law to this Great Republic ? NORTH AND SOUTH. 459 In the South, you had a gentle class and a servile class. One fought and ruled ; one labored and obeyed. Between these two sections of the Southern people yawned a mighty gulf, — a separating chasm of lineage, form, and color ; for the higher breed was of pure old English blood, oftspring of men who had been the glories of Elizabeth's court; while the lower breed was of African descent, offspring of the mango plain and the ague swamp, children of men who had held the basest rank even among savages and slaves, No bridge could be thrown across that chasm, No touch of nature, it was thought, would ever be able to make the extremes of black and white of kin. In the eyes of their lords and ladies, — most of all in those of their ladies, — these colored tenders of the rice-field and the cotton-plant were not men ; they were only cattle, with the rights which belong to mules and cows ; the right to be fed and lodged in return for work, and to be treated mercifully — after their kind. In many of these States the colored people dared not learn to read and write ; they could not marry, and hold on truly, man and wife, to each other ; they had no control over their own children ; they could not own either pigs, ducks, cows, or other stock ; nor were they suffered to buy and sell, to hire out their labor, to use a family name. Against each other they had certain remedies for wrong ; against the white man they had none. To use the sadly memorable phrase of Chief Justice Taney, a negro had no rights which a white man w^as bound to respect ; in other words, he had none at all. It is much to say that among men so tempted to abuse of power, there was less w^aste of life than in any other slave society, even on the American soil, Vir- ginia was a paradise compared with Cuba and Brazil. Some touch of softness in the lord, some orleam of 460 NEW AMERICA. piety in the mistress, had sufficed to keep the veiy worst planters of English blood free from the brutali- ties which were daily practised in .the Spanish and Portuguese cities farther south. Charleston was not a pleasant place for a negro slave ; the law was not with him in his need ; oftentimes he had to bear the bitter fruits of a tyrant's wrath. He was only too familiar with the lash, the chain, the blood-hound, and the jail ; but still, when weighed against the slave's condition in Havana, in Rio, in San Domingo, his life was that of a spoiled and petted child. The test of a people's happiness is the law of its reproduction. If a race is crushed beyond a certain point, nature pro- tests against the wrong in her own emphatic way. The race declines. Now the negro has been dying away in every slave society on the American soil, save only on that which has been ruled by men of the Anglo-Saxon race. Bad as our rule, and that of our offshoots in Virginia and the Carolinas, may have been, the fact is legible on every part of this continent, in every island of the adjacent seas, that these English planters, and they alone, have given the African a chance of life. We put, from first to last, five hun- dred thousand negroes on the soil of our thirteen colonies ; we made them toil and sweat for us ; still, we treated them on the whole with so much mercy, that they are now nine times stronger, counting them by heads, than the number of their imported sires. In Spanish America, instead of the negroes of the present hour being nine times stronger than their fathers, they scarcely count one half the original tale. This is a little fact — recorded in a line; but what tragedies of woe and death it hides ! When the great account is made up^ — when all that we have done, — all that we have left undone, — is urged against us, may we not plead NORTH AND SOUTH. 461 this increase of the negro under our dominion as some small set-off to our many sins? A tourist from the Old World — one of the idler classes — found himself much at home in tliese coun- try mansions. The houses were well planned and built ; tlie furniture was rich ; the table and the wine were good ; the books, the prints, the music, were such as he had known in Europe. He found plenty of horses and servants; spacious grounds, fine woods, abundant game. In one place he got a little hunting; in a second place a little fishing. ISTearly all the young ladies rode well, danced well, sang well. The men were frank, audacious, hospitable. W hat was unsightly in the place was either far away from a stranger's eyes, or made to look comical and picturesque. He heard of slavery as a jest, and went down to the plantation to see a play. Sam was called up before him to grin and yelp. A dance being on, and the can of punch going round as the negroes hopped and sang, he would go home from the scene merrily confused, and with an idea that the darkey rather loved his chains. In Missouri and Virginia I have seen enough to know how easily tourists may be deceived by the lightness and laughter of a negro crowd. A colored man is plastic, loving, docile ; for a kindly word, for a drink of whisky, for a moment's frolic, he will sing and dance. He is very patient, very slow. In Omaha I found a rowdy beating a black lad in the street and inquired the cause: — "me say nig;ger have right to vote," said the lad; "disgel'man say nigger ain't folks nohow." The lad made no complaint of being beaten : indeed, he laughed as though he liked it. If the white man ha.d been his master, he, too, would have smiled, and I should possibly have thought it a pretty jest. The South was made pleasant to its English guest; 3<) * 4C2 NEW AMEBIC A. for the people felt that the English were of nearer kin to them than their Yankee brethren. A sunny sky, a smiling hostess, an idle life, and a luxurious couch, led him softly to forget the foundations on which that seducing fabric stood. In the Northern States such a lotus-eater would have found but little to his taste. The country- houses — except in the neighborhood of Philadelphia, where the fine old English style is still in vogue — were not so spacious and so splendid as in the South ; the climate was much colder; and the delights of lounging were much less. He had nothing to do, and nobod}' had time to help him. The men being all intent on their aiiairs, they neither hunted, fished, nor danced ; they talked of scarcely anything but their mills, their mines, their roads, their fisheries ; they were always eager, hurried, and absorbed, as though the universe hung upon their arms, and they feared to let it fall. The women, too, were busy with a care and trouble of their own. JSTo idle mornings in the library, in the green-house, on the lawn, could be got from these busy creatures, who were gone from the breakfiist-table to the school-room, to the writing-desk, to the sewing-frame, long befpre the guest had played out his fund of compliments and jokes. It was true that when they could be got to talk about science, politics, and letters, he found them read to the highest point — full of the last fact, the last movement, the last book ; bright and knowing people, who let nothing pass them, and with the habit of turning their acquire- ments to instant use ; sometimes making him do ser- vice in an unexpected way. But he, an idler in the land, had no enjoyment in their rapid talk. They thought of him little, of their own projects much. When he wanted only to loll and dream, his host had NORTH AND SOUTH. 4G3 to meet a banker in the city, his hostess had to teach a class in the vilkige-schooL He must amuse himself, he was always being told, until the afternoon. There was the coal-mine to see, the new bridge to inspect, the steam-harrow to test. What did he care about coal, and bridge, and harrow! He would smoke a cigarette, and take the very next train for Richmond. In these sumiy Southern houses, with their long verandas, their pleasant lawns, no man was busy, no woman was in haste. Every one had time for wit, for compliment, for small talk. The day went by in gos- sip. No man there ever thought of working, for to work was the slave's office. Work was ignoble in these cities. Society had said, " Thou shalt not labor, and escape the curse;" and white men would not put their hands to the plough. " Work ! " said a stout young fellow in Tennessee to a man from whom he was ask- ing alms, " thank God, I have never done a stroke of work since I was born; I am not going to change; you may hang me if you like, but you shall never make me work." In these sad words spoke the spirit of the South. "In one thing we were wrong," said to me a Georgian gentleman; " our pride would not let US teach. We had scarcely any professors in the South. Our people were well trained and grounded ; we had some good scholars and more good speakers ; but we had to send into our enemies' schools, to Cam- bridge and New Haven, for our teachers, whether male or female ; and they almost taught our children to be Yankees." Teaching was work, and a Georgian could neither work nor recognize the dignity of work. In one of those passionate storms which sometimes swept across these languid cities, the evils of this bor- rowed life being clear, it was proposed to found a great University in the South, and to invite, l)y liberal 464 NEW AMEBIC A. chairs, the most eminent men of literature and science from Europe, and also from the North ; among them, Prof Agassiz, who was to have been installed their chief. "And how about our social standing?" asked the great professor, from whom I heard these details. There came the rub. The social standing of a teacher in the South ! A teacher could not hope to hold any standing in the slave society, and thereupon the pro- posal to invite the best men to come over from Oxford and Berlin, as well as from Boston and I^ew Haven, tumbled to the ground. In the ]!^orthern cities you had neither a gentle class nor a servile class. In their stead you had men of learning, business, enterprise ; men of as pure and lofty lineage as the Southern chivalry, with fresher notions, hardier habits, and a larger faith. The Mid- dle Ages and the Modern Ages could not come to- gether and live in peace ; each would be master in the Great Republic, — on the one side Chivalry, with its glories and its vices ; on the other side. Equality, with its ardor and its hopes. Which of these two principles — Privilege, Equal- ity — was to govern this Great Republic? COLOR. 465 CHAPTER LXIV. COLOR. One chance the white man had, and still might have — of living here, in Virginia, also down in Ala- bama, Mississippi, and the Carolinas, a social and political life apart from his English brother in Penn- sylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio ; but the course to be taken by him is one from which it is commonly believed that his pride must revolt, and his taste re- coil, — a family alliance with the negro race. Long before the ugly word miscegenation came into use, and young damsels in ringlets and chignons stood up in public pleading for a mixture of breeds, many sincere, and some serious, men had proached the dogma of a saving quality in the negro blood. Chan- ning had prepared the way for Anna Dickenson. In their flowery prose, the New England teachers had bestowed upon their negro client in the South an emotional nature far above anything that his poor white brother in the North could boast. On the hard and selfish side of his intellect, a white man might be cursed with keener power ; the point was moot ; but in all that concerned his moral nature, — the religious instincts, the family afiections, the social graces, — the negro was declared to be a softer, sweeter, and supe- rior being. He was far more sensitive to signs and dreams, to the voice of birds, to the cries of children, to the heat of noon, to the calm of night. He had a finer ear for song, a quicker relish for the dance. He loved color with a wiser love. He had a deeper yearning after places ; a fresher delight in worship ; a 466 NEW AMERICA. livelier sense of the Fatherhood of God. These fancy pictures of the negro — drawn in a New England study, a thousand miles from a rice-field and a cotton plantation — culminated in Uncle Tom. Many good people in the l^ortli had begun to think it would be well for these pale and bilious shadows of the South, to marry their sons and daughters to such highly-gifted and emotional creatures, with a view to restoring the strength and thickening the fibre of their race. When the "War broke out, this feeling spread ; as it raged and stormed, this feeling deepened : and now, when the War is over, and the South lies prostrate, there is a party in New England, counting women in its ranks, who would be glad, if they could find a way, to marry the whole white popu- lation, living south of Richmond, to the blacks. Again and again I have heard men, grave of face and clean of life, declare in public, and to sympathizing hearers, that a marriage of white and black would improve the paler stock. In every case these marriages were to happen a long way off. I have met more than one lady who did not shrink from saying that, in her be- lief, it would be a great improvement for some of the fair damsels of Charleston and of Savannah to wed black husbands. I never met a lady who said it would be well for her own girls to do so. The War has wrought a change in favor of the negro, who is now a petted mortal in the North, to be mentioned as "the colored gentleman," not as "the damned black rascal " of former times. He rides in the street-cars; he has a right to sit by his white brother in a railway ; he may enter the same church, and pray in the adjoining pew. Public men make speeches for him, female lecturers expound him. I have heard Captain Anthony, a New England orator. COLOR. 467 declare that if he wanted to find a good heart in the Southern States, he should look for it under a sable skin ; if he wanted to find a good head, he should look for it under woolly hair. That strange thing was said in Kansas, in one of the cleverest speeches I have ever heard. The fact is, the negro is here the coming man. Parties being nicely poised, the dark men being likely to get votes, they are even now, in view of that heirship, courted, "flattered, and cajoled. During the War the negro proved himself a man : — the black and brown lads who rushed into yon fort (now held by Harry Pierman and his imps) made all their fellows men forever. Six years ago, as I am told, no lady in Boston, in JS'ew York, in Philadelphia, could bear to have a negro servant near her: a black man drank and stank; he was a cheat, a liar, a sot, a thief. I do not find this feeling wholly gone: here and there it may linger for many years ; but it is greatly changed ; and I have heard very dainty ladies in Boston and ISTew York, express a liking for the negro as a household help. He is neat and willing ; quick with his hand ; good- humored, grateful. Some of his race are handsome, with the grace and style which are held the signs of blood. Here, in Eichmond, and at all hotels from IS'ew York to Denver, negroes serve at table, shave and dress you, clean your boots, and wait upon your person. In the many hundreds who have been about me, I have never heard one saucy word, never seen one sulky scowl. One of the negroes whom we saw in Leavenworth was asked whether he would marry and settle, seeing that he had saved a good deal of money. " N'o, sar ; me not marry : no white lady have me, and me not 468 NEW AMERICA. have white woman who marry me for money." On being asked why he could not court and win a woman from his own people, he exclaimed, "Lord, sar! you not think I marry a black nigger wench ? " Yet the fellow was a full-blooded negro, black as a piece of coal. That the negro is fitted, by his humor, by his indus- try, by his sociality, for a very high form of civil life, may be safely assumed. Some negroes are rich and learned, practise at the bar, preach from the pulpit, strut upon the stage. Many have a great desire to learn and to get on. Here is Eli Brown, head waiter in the Richmond hotel; a man with a bright eye, a sharp tongue, a quick hand. A few months since he was a slave. He learned to read in secret, and in daily fear of the lash ; since he got his freedom, he has learned to write. In this black lad, I have found more sense of right and wrong, of policy and justice, than in half the platform orators of the schools. "Tell me, Eli, do you want a vote?" I said to him in the after-dinner chat, as he stood behind my chair. "JSTot now, sir," he replied; "I have not read enough yet, and do not understand it all. Sometime I would like to vote, like the others ; in twenty or twenty-five years." Is not a man with so much sense fitter for the franchise than a pot-house yelper, who does not know how much he has still to learn ? Last night, I went with Eli round this city ; not to see its stores and bars, its singing-rooms and hells; but bent on a series of peeps into the negro schools. They are mostly up in garrets or down in vaults ; poor rooms, with scant supplies of benches, desks, and books. In some, the teacher is a white ; in many he is either a black or half-caste. Old men, young lads, were equally intent on learning in these humble COLOR. 469 schools ; fellows of sixty pottering with the pen, and iiat-nosed little urchins tugging at their ABC. All were working with a will; bent on conquering the first great obstacles to knowledge. These men are not waiting for the world to come and cheer them with its grand endowments and its national schools; they have begun the work of emancipating themselves from the thraldom of ignorance and vice. In Eich- mond only there are forty of these negro schools. In the fronl of men inspired by such a spirit, the planters cannot afford to lie still and rust in their ancient pride. Knowledge is power, and the weaker man always goes to the wall. But though the planter may, and must, prepare himself to compete with a new class on his own estate, does it follow that he must mix his blood with that of his former slave? The feeling of aversion to the negro as an associate, even for a passing moment in a room, a church, a rail- way carriage, though it may be softening, as the negro grows in freedom, wealth, and culture, is very strong ; not only here, in Richmond, where the negro was a chattel, to be bought and sold, starved, beaten, spat on, by his lordly brother, but in the West and North, in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Chicago, far away from the sights and sounds of a servile class. Since the War was closed, a negro has a legal right to enter any public vehicle plying in the streets for hire ; but, in many cases, he dares not exercise his right. A cabman would not drive him ; a conductor would not let him step into a ladies' car. In passing through Ohio, a State in which the colored folks are numerous, being struck by the absence of all dark faces from the cars, I went forward to the front of our train, and there, between the tender and the luggage van, found a separate pen, filthy beyond words to suggest, in which 40 470 NEW AMEBIC A. were a dozen free negroes, going the same road and paying the same fare as myself^ " Why do these ne- groes ride apart — why not travel in the common cars?" I asked the guard', "Well," said he, with a sudden lightning in his eyes, "they have the right; but, damn them, I should like to see them do it. Ugh!" The ugly shudder of the guard recalled a black expression of Big Elk, one of my Cheyenne comforters on the Plains. Here, in Virginia, all the railway companies have posted orders to the effect that, when a negro has paid his fare, he may ride in any car he pleases, subject to the common rules; but, gracious heavens ! what negro dares to put his feet on the white man's steps? Sam likes 'his free condition : at times, he may air his liberty offensively under his former master's nose ; but he also loves his skin ; and in a land where every man carries a revolver, lingering it as freely as in England we should sport with a cigar- case, Sam knows how far he may go, and where he must stop. Habits are not changed by a paper law ; and the day of a perfectly free and friendly intercourse between whites and blacks is yet a long way off. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, you will hear it said, in favor of miscegenation, that this scheme for blending races and mixing blood is no new method ; but one which had long prevailed in Virginia, Caro- lina, and Alabama. Your teachers tell you that mis- cegenation is a fact, not a theory, a Southern habit, not a Northern project. They take you into the streets, hotels, and barbers' shops ; they bid you look at these yellow negroes, some pale as Moors, some white as Spaniards ; and they ask you to tell them whence come these Saxon features, these blue gray eyes, these deli- cate hands ? They show you a negress with golden hair. Do such things prove that the white blood will COLOR. 471 not mingle with the black? Sail to Newport, ride to Saratoga. These idling places swarm with colored servants; every man, every woman of whom might he put in evidence of the truth. What is seen in New- port, in Saratoga, is also seen at Niagara, at Long Branch, at Lebanon Springs, at every watering-place in this Republic. North of the Potomac, it is a rare thing to find a pure African black. Many of your house-servants are half-castes, more still are quadroons and octoroons. Broad traces of either English or Spanish blood may be seen in nearly all ; in the color, in the carriage, in the contour, in the style. This pale wdiite negro, Pete, has the air of a grandee. Eli, my friend here, has the bearing of a judge. Who knows where Pete, where Eli, got that lofty air? Li Virginia, in Carolina, the black squat face, with its huge lips, its low forehead, its open nostrils, is seen in every street. It is not a comely face to look on : though the folks who wear this form and hue are not such brutes as they are sometimes called. Many of them are bright and thriving ; Harry Pierman is a fullblooded negro. But even in Richmond these colored people have a large admixture of Saxon blood. Eli Brown is a half- caste ; so is Pete ; most of these clever lads, our ser- vants, are quadroons. It is certain, therefore, as the New England teachers say, that miscegenation, instead of being a new thing in the South, has been known and practised for many years. Thus far, however, it has been practised only on one side, — on the male side ; and the new plan for mixing the blood of white and black appears to be only a branch of that mighty theory of reform, now agitating and unsettling all society — the theory of equal rights for sex and sex. Hitherto, miscegenation has been open to men, denied to women. Male Saxon life has 472 NEW AMERICA. long been passing into negro veins ; and that shrewd observer, Captain Anthony, who said he should look for a good heart under a sable skin, a good head under woolly hair, gave this strange reason for his faith in negro courage and negro talent — that the best blood of Virginia and Carolina flows in the veins of this col- ored race. For ten generations, he asserts, the youth of this English gentry has been given up to negro para- mours ; nearly all that time the breeding of slaves for the market has been a trade in these Southern parts. No sense of shame, he says, either prevented a father from giving his heir a pretty quadroon for a playmate, or from afterwards selling the fruits of their illicit love. When, according to Captain Anthony, his youth was spent, his heart Avas sear, and his brain was dull, this heir of a gentle house was married to a white woman, who bore him children and preserved his name. Is it not clear, asked the speaker, that the strength and freshness of that gentle family should be sought for in negro ranks ? Why, the reformer then comes in and asks, if such things can be allowed on one side, why not on the other ? If it be right for a man to love a negro mis- tress, why should it De wrong for a woman to wed a negro husband ? Thus it would appear from a review of facts and sentiments, that this sudden and alarming theory of miscegenation is no more than an effort to make free for all that which is now only free for some ; an effort to give legal standing, moral sanction, to what is already a habit of the stronger sex. But among this stronger sex, with the rare exception of a poet here, a philosopher there, this idea of intro- ducing a fashion of love and wedlock among white women and black men excites the wildest rage. Gen- tlemen sitting at table, sipping soup, picking terapin. COLOR. 473 will clench tlieir hands and gnaw their lips at any allu- sion to the subject. Americans are not squeamish as to jokes ; but you must not jest in their society about the loves of black men for white women. Merely for paying a compliment where it is thought he should not, a negro would be ilogged and tarred and hung. No punishment would be deemed brutal and fierce enough for such a sinner. A friend who knew what he was saying, told me in the western countr}^ that he had seen a negro seized by a mob for having insulted a white girl; his oft'ence was that of giving the girl a kiss, with an appearance of aiming at a further free- dom ; and on the girl screaming for assistance, he was collared by a soldier, a native of Ohio, and dragged into Fort Halleck, where he was cuffed and kicked, tarred and feathered, set on fire, skinned alive, and finally stuck, half-dead, in a firkin, and exposed on the open Plains, until his flesh was eaten away by wolves and hawks. My friend, who told me this story, a Missourian by birth, a soldier in the War, had no conception that I should be shocked by such details, that I should con- sider the punishment in excess of the offence, that I shouldthink the Oliio soldier guilty of a grievous crime. In the Western country life is lightly held and lightly taken. No one puts the high value on a drop of blood which we of the elder country set upon it. A white man counts for little — less than for a horse ; a black man counts for nothing — less than for a dog. All this I knew ; and therefore I could understand my friend. A time may perhaps come, as poets feign and preachers prophesy, when the negro man and the Saxon woman will be husband and wife ; but the day when they can go to church together, for the celebra- 474 NEW AMEBIC A. tion of their marriage rites, without exciting the wrath, provoking the revenge, of these masculine protectors of white women, is evidently a long way off. CHAPTER LXV. RECONSTRUCTION. In the great contest now going forward in every part of this Republic as to the safest theory of recon- struction, — that is to say, as to the principle and plan on which the New America may be built up — every party seems to have put the Union in its front. Un- der the dome of yon glorious New Capitol, men from the North and from the South appeared to be equally eloquent and ardent for the flag. All speakers have the word upon their lips, all writers have the symbol in their style. Unity would seem to be, not only the political religion of men in oflice, but the inspiration of every man who desires to serve his country. No other cry has a chance of being heard. Not to join in this popular demand is to be guilty of a grave offence. "We are all for the Union," said to me a Virginian lady not an hour ago, "the Union as it was, if we may have it so; our sole desire is to stand where we stood in '61." So far as you can hear in Rich- mond, this expression would appear to convey the general wish. North of the Potomac, too, the desire to have done with the past five years of trouble and dissension is universal. In the new elections, evcrv candidate for oflice has EECONSTBUO TION. 475 been forced by the public passion, though often against his will, to adopt this watch-cry of the nation for himself and for his friends ; while he has found his profit in denouncing his enemies and their parti- sans as disunionists, — a denunciation which, in the present temper of men, is taken to imply all the worst treacheries and corruptions, present and to come ; in fact, to clothe a man with such uncleanness of mind and body as lay in the Hebrew phrase of a whited-wall. Union is a word of grace, of sweetness, and of charm. Everybody takes it to himself, everybody claims it for his section. Disunion, a word so musical in Rich- mond, Ealeigh, New Orleans, not thirty months ago, is now a ban, a stigma, a reproach. Its day is past. Republicans call their Democratic rivals disunionists ; Democrats describe their Republican adversaries as disunionists. Each section writes the word Union on its ticket, and the shout of this common word from the opposite camps is apt to confuse a free and inde- pendent elector when he comes to vote. Even here, in Richmond, the capital of a proud and fallen cause, in which the streets are yet black with fire, around which the fields are yet sick with blood, there is scarcely any other cry among the wise, the moderate, and the hopeful. A few, unquestionably, cling with a passionate warmth to the memory of the past; but every day, as it goes by, is thinning the ranks of these sentimental martyrs. The young, who feel that their life is before them, not behind, are all coming round to a larger and more practical view of tacts. They see that the battle has been fought, that the prize for which they struggled has been lost. Slavery is gone. State rights are gone. The dream of independence is gone. Men who are hopelessly compromised by events — who feel that the victorious 476 ^^^W AMERICA. States can never again intrust them with political power — may urge on their fellows the merit and the virtue of despair; but the younger men of this nation feel that sullenness and silence will not help them to undo the victories of Sherman, Sheridan, and Grant. Excepting in the society of women — a class of gener-^ ous and noble, but illogical and impracticable reason- ers — not many persons in the South (I am told) re- gard the prospect of reunion with a free and powerful republic, just awakening, at their instance, to a con- sciousness of its colassal might, with any other feeling than a proud and eager joy. Richmond is not, just now, in a mood of much emotion ; since she fell into Northern hands her habit has been that of a proud and cold reserve; yet so soon as the pending elections roused in her a little life, her enthusiasm, such as it was, ran wholly in the form of the ancient flag. At a dinner party given in this city the other day, a politician proposed as a toast, " The fallen flag." " Hush, gentlemen ! " said a son of Gen- eral Lee, " this sort of thing is past. We have no flag now but the glorious Stars and Stripes, and I will neither fight, nor drink, for any other." From the tone and temper of such political debate as one hears in Richmond, I see no reason to suspect (with some of the New York papers) that this patriot- ism of Virginia is the result of either fear or craft ; for in my poor judgment, no disaster, however dark, no privation, however keen, could have driven these proud Virginian gentry into pleading for a renewal of friendly relations on other than the usual grounds of political science. The return to wiser feelings on the part of these vanquished soldiers seems to have been the natural consequence of events. The life before them is a new life. Slaverv is s^one, and the RECONSTRUCTION. 477 hatreds provoked by slavery are going. Men have to look their fortunes in the face, and it is well that they should do it without suffering their judgment to be warped by the disturbing passions so commonly found on a losing side. How are the planters to maintain their place — not in the Great Republic only, but in Carolina and Virginia ? At present they are an- aris- tocracy without a servile class. They have great estates; but they have no capital, no mills, no ships, no laborers. They are burdened with enormous debts. They have scarcely any direct and indepen- dent intercourse with foreign nations. Worse than all, they are surrounded, in their fields and in their houses, by a population of inferior race. Does it need any more than a little good sense to perceive that the English gentry in the South may find their Dest account in a partnership with the English citizens of the North, even though these latter should impose on the repentant prodigals a forgiving kinsman's terms ? The blacks are strong in numbers, clanish in spirit ; they are fond of money, and have the virtue to earn and save. Can you prevent the negroes from growing rich, from educating their children at good schools, from aspiring to otlices of trust and power? They will rise both individually and in classes. The day is not far distant when, in States like Alabama and South Carolina, the race may be swift and hard between the black planter and the white. When that day comes, will it not be well for the white man to have gained for himself some support in the power and enterprise of his brother in the ITorth ? In these semi-tropical parts of the Republic a white man faints where the black man thrives. Nature has, therefore, put the white planter at a disadvantage on 478 NEW AMEBIC A. this Soutliern soil. For a dozen years to come, per- haps more, the negroes, who were only yesterday in chains and poverty, may be sorely tried ; for they are rooted to the soil ; they have neither trades nor call- ings ; they are ignorant of letters ; they have very little money ; scarcely any of them have friends. Be- fore them stands a world in which they are free to labor and free to starve. At first, they must be ser- vants in the families, toilers on the plantations, in which they have recently been slaves; yet in some cases the negro has already become a planter on his own account, having gained, in a few months, a supply of tools and a lease of lands. Take the example of my friend Henry Pierman, a negro, who has planted himself out yonder in Har- rison's Fort, in a log-cabin, amidst the reek and stench of the great battle-fields. As no white man would rent such land, the lady who owns it, poorer and less proud than she was in former years, has been glad to let a great patch of forest to Henry. The log-hut has but a single room, and in this one room he lives with his black and comely wife, his four young imps, and a brood of cocks and hens. Harry was a slave until Grant tore his way through these formidable lines, when he became free by the great act of war which made all his people free. Happily for him, he had been a domestic slave in one of those rich Virginian households in which nobody cared about the laws. One of the young ladies, more for fun than with serious thought, had defied the police and the magistrate by teaching him to read. Her father being the Governor of Virginia, she snapped her pretty fingers at the judge. Harry read the Bible, and became a member of the Baptist church. Like all his brethren, he is keenly alive to religious passion, subject to dreams RE C ONS TR UC TION. 479 and voices, one of which had told him, he asserts, while he was yet a youth and a slave, that he would one day become a free man, would marry, would have children, and would rent a farm of his own. Many years went by before his dream came out, but he prayed and waited; in the end he found that this promise of his youth was kept. So soon as the liber- ating armies entered Richmond he left his old place, though his master had been kind to him, and wished to keep him as a servant on hire ; but the passion to be free was in his veins ; voices called him from the city into the fields; and, without money, ploughs, scythes, seed, horses, stock of any kind, with only his black wife to help him, and his three youngsters to feed, he threw himself on the forest land. Last year, his trial-year, was found to be bitter work, but he had put his soul into his task, and he got on. Up early and late, pinching his back and his belly, he was able to send a few onions and tomatoes, a little corn and wood, to market. This produce bought him tools, and paid his rent in kind. By patience he got through the winter months, In the second year his enterprises have extended to a hundred and forty acres, and he has now the help of two other negroes, one of them his wife's father, whom he has lodged in another of these soldiers' huts. One-fourth of his produce pays the rent ; the remaining three-fourths he divides into two equal portions, one of which he gives to his negro helpers, the other he retains for himself and wife. Henry is clever, pushing, devout ; for his children, if not for himself, he is ambitious. One of his two lads is shortly to begin his school-work ; at present he must toil upon the farm. "I heard dc angel say in my dream," he said to me with simple faith, " dat I bring up my children in de fear of de Lord ; and how man 480 NjEW amebic a. bring clem up in fear of de Lord, unless he teach dem to read and write?" The field of enterprise for working-men like Henry Pierman is extremely wide. Two-thirds of the soil of Virginia are still uncleared ; indeed this old and lovely State is everywhere rich in mines, in water- ways, in wood and coal, which a splendid and careless people have left to wait and rot. Each year will see the band of negro farmers grow on these Virginian waste lands ; and when the colored people have grown rich and educated, how can they be kept from social and political power ? In some States of the South, they are many: in one State, South Carolina, they count more than half the population ; so that South Carolina, standing by itself and governed by universal suffrage, w^ould vote itself a negro legislature, perhaps a negro governor. These dark people are growing faster than the pale. In time they will own ships and mines, banks and granaries; and when they have gathered up money and votes, how will the white man be able to hold his easy and safe supremacy in these semi-tropical States unless by union with his white brethren in the North ? Of course, while every hope and every fear may be thus impelling Korth and South to reunite, each sec- tion may still desire to construct the E'ew America on terms best suited to itself. Deprived by the war of their slaves, laden with debts, both personal and ter- ritorial, the Southern planters would like to rejoin the ancient league as equals, if it may be, as more than equals. Under the old Constitution they were more than equals, since they voted for themselves and for their slaves ; and what they were aforetime they would like to be again. But Northern statesmen, flushed with their recent RE CONS TR U C TIO N. 481 glories, have no mind to put back the sword into its sheath, until they shall have fully secured the objects for which they fought; one of which objects is, to prevent, in future, a Charleston planter from exer- cising in the national councils a larger share of power than falls to the lot of a manufacturer of Boston, a banker of New York. Such larger share of power the Constitution had given to the Charleston planter, on account of his holding property in slaves ; repre- sentation in the Capitol being based on population; five negroes counting for three free men ; and the masters voting, not for themselves only, but for their slaves. The strife of policy rages for the moment wholly around this point. The two moderate parties, between w^hicli the strug- gle of the coming years will mainly lie, are the Re- publican and the Democrat. The Republicans, strong in the North, are weak in the South ; the Democrats, strong in the South, are weak at the North ; but each party has its organization and its follow^ers in every State of the Republic. They have other points of diiference ; but the chief contention now dividing them, is as to what guaranties shall be demanded from the rebellious States before they come into Con- gress and take their chances in the fight for power. The Republicans say, that all white men in the Union, that is to say, all the voters, should be made equal to each other before the ballot-box; that each man should poll once and for himself only, with no distinction of North or South. The black man they leave out of their account; he is to them as a minor, a woman ; having no rights at the poll and in the legislature. This change in the law of voting cannot be made and put into force until the Constitution shall have been first amended. That charter based the 41 482 NEW AMERICA. power of representation on population, without regard to the number of voters. The negroes counted as people, and their masters got the political profit of their presence on the soih In the Old America, the planters who exercised this power may have fairly represented the negro mind, so far as negroes had opinions and emotions ; but this Old America is gone for ever; the planter can no longer answer for his slave ; and his claim by the old law to give this vote on the black man's behalf, must be done away. In future, all white men in the United States must have an equal power at the poll ; hence, the Kepublicans have framed a bill, amending the Constitution so far as to base the representation in Congress not on the number of persons, but on the number of voters. A majority in the new Congress is certain to be of opinion that this bill should pass. The Democrats assert that any amendment of the ^Constitution is illegal, revolutionary, needless. They say, and in theory they rightly say, that representation should be based on population ; on a great natural fact, easily ascertained, capable of proof; not on a whimsy, a convenience of the day, a mere local act, which may be passed to-day, re-called to-morrow. They clench the doctrine which the moderate section among Republicans profess to have adopted, that a black man, in his pres'ent state of ignorance, is not fit to vote; but then they add, that as the black man shall not vote himself, his more liberal and enlightened neighbor, like the electoral classes in a European state, should be allowed to cast his vote into the urn. These Democrats have the g-reat advautas^e of seeming O Ci rt to stand by the law and Constitution, but their reason- ing against the constitutional bill is seen to be futile and unsound. President Johnson and his cabinet are RE CONS TR UCTION. 483 of opinion that this Constitutional Amendment should not pass. Each party finds a certain amount of sympathy in the hostile camp. The Northern Radicals object to the Constitutional Amendment as illegal and unneces- sary ; asserting, with the Democrats, that representa- tion should be based on natural population, not on the number of legal voters; asserting, with the Republi- cans, that all white men should have equal rights in the urn ; and declaring, in the face of both these parties, that the negro should be allowed to give his vote for himself. In like manner, the Southern moderates, while they hold to many doctrines which the North will not indorse, are not unwilling to unite with them on the terms of equal rights proposed by the Republicans. This party of peace and compromise is perhaps the strongest, numerically, in the South ; but the hopes of more fanatical men have been so hotly fanned by President Johnson and his agents, that calm and reasonable counsels have been heard among the old governing classes with a certain stiff- ness and impatience. We need not judge these parties with heat and haste. After her losses in the field, the South may easily persuade herself that she has a right to ask for much, and to take whatever advantages she can of the divided counsels of her foes. 48^4 ^'^ ^ AMERICA . CHAPTER LXVI. UNION. The main obstacle, then, to a Union, such as late events have made possible, and the interests of all parties would suggest, is not the temper of either North or South, but the existence of a paper-law, for which every American has been trained to express a veneration almost equal to that which he professes for the Word of God. If any human effort of the pen is sacred in the eyes of these people, it is their Constitution. Indeed, a stranger in the land can hardly comprehend the rever- ence — sometimes rising into awe — with which brave Virginians, practical Pennsylvanians, bright New Englanders, always speak of their Organic law. Apart from the affection borne to it by a great people, that organic law, from whatever point of view it is re- garded, fails to impress a student of politics as being the highest effort of human genius. It is less than a hundred years old, and has none of the halo which comes of time. It was not a growth of the soil and of the English mind, but an exotic, drawn from the foreign and artificial atmosphere of France. On the day of its adoption it was no more than a compromise, and ever since that day it has stood in the way of progress in the United States. The principles em- bodied in it are in direct antagonism to that splendid document, which often lies by its side in the text- books — the Declaration of Independence; for the Constitution denies that all men are free and equal, umo^'. 485 and refuses to large classes of the people the pursuit of their own happiness. "Who can forget how often, and with what success, tliat Constitution has been cited in evidence that the negro slave was not considered by the founders of this Ixcpublic, as a human being? If all men are pro- nounced free and equal, by the fact of their birth, it is only too obvious that creatures held in bondage are not men. But everyone knows -that the Declaration of Independence set forth the true and final views of those founders, while the Constitution expressed no more than the political compromises of a day. The very men who signed it wished it to be amended ; in the first convulsion which has tried the political fabric of this country, it is found to be the cause of a thou- sand disasters. It has brought the country to such a stand that years may possibly elapse before the facts which have been accomplished, and which cannot be reversed, can be set in harmonious relation to the paper-laws. While Americans are busy, unmaking and amending their Constitution, may they not fairly put to them- selves the question. What is the use of this record? At best, when the letter of a constitution is true in every detail — true to the designs of God in His moral government of men, true to the life and hope of the people in whose name it is drawn up — it is only a definition of facts. It is a thing of the past; a record of what the people have been, and of what they are. But the act of defining is also one of narrowing, limiting, restricting. Why should the life of a great continent bo narrowed down to a phrase ? How can a progressive country pretend to limit its power of future growth ? By what right may a free common- wealth presume to restrain ihe march of ideas and 41 * 486 -V^"' AM £ RICA. events ? In a despotic state, where men are neither free nor equal, where growth is not expected, where prosperity is not desired, a paper law, unchanging as that of the Medes and Persians, may have reason for existence ; for under such a rule the people can never hope to rise into that highest state of being a law unto themselves. In a country like America, a real con- stitution should be a vital fact, not a piece of paper, and a dubious phrase. England never had a written constitution. How could she have ? Her constitution is her life. All that she has ever been, ever done, ever sufi'ered — these are her constitutions, because they are herself What would she gain by trying to write down this story in a dozen articles ? She would gain a set of manacles. !N'o dozen phrases could express the whole of her vitalities. Some of these are ob- vious, others latent; no one can remember all the past, no one can foresee all the future. Yv^'hy not be content to let the nation live ? "Would any sane man think of making a constitution for a garden, of hang- ing a paper chain on the stems of plants? Yet men in a free soil have wider possibilities of change in them than trees and flowers. Could anybody dream of devising, a constitution for sciences like chemistry, astronom}', and physics ? Where you have power of growth, you nmsthave order, method, understanding; not a final theory, not an infallible law. And what ^ve the advantages derived from a Con- stitution ? Are you afraid that people would forget their principles and betray their freedom, unless they w^ere restrained from wandering by these paper notes? That is the common fear. But see what this fear implies, and saj- whether all that it implies is just. As men cannot wander from their own natures, their own instincts and passions, yon have to assume that UNION. 487 your Constitution has a life apart froin that of your people; that it is a political fiction, not a moral and social truth. If the Constitution exists in the blood and brain of this bright and tenacious people — if it be the genuine product of what they have done, of •what they are — you need not fear its being forgotten and betrayed. If it is an alien statute, what right have you to force it upon them ? In the present state of feeling with respect to the Constitution, I do not think that anybody would be heard with patience who should propose to set the people free, by putting it to a decent encl. The time for such a work may come. At present no one dreams of doing more than amending a defective instrument in several places ; so as to cast away some of the very worst articles inserted in it by the slave proprietors. Only the radicals propose to bring it into harmony with the Declaration of Independence. But while the political doctors are at work upon it, may it not be worth their while to consider — Whether it would not be better to confine their task to cutting away the obnoxious parts? "Why not open the Constitution by removing its restrictions ? Why add to a document which they admit to be defective? They know that if thit5 paper barrier had not stood in their way, the differences between North and South would have ended with the defeat of Lee. Why then prepare fresh difliculties for their children, by adding new compromises to the organic statutes? In a few years, E'orth and South will be one again ; state rights wilh have been forgotten, and the negro will have found his place. A free Republic cannot hope to enjoy the repose of a despotic State ; to com- bine the repose of Pekin with the movement of San Francisco, the order of Miako with the vitality of 488 NEW AMERICA. New York. Ebb and flow may be predicted of the future; at one time public thonglit will be found ebbing towards separation, personality, and freedom; another time it will be found flowing again towards union, brotherhood, and empire ; bnt the tides of sentiment may bo expected to roll from East to "West, from West to East, without provoking a second wreck. That article left uncertain in the Constitution, as to the power of any one State to part from its fellows without their leave, has been now defined by facts. War on that question will not come again ; hut heats will come, passions will be roused, and orators will take the field, even though the sword may not again bo drawn ; one side in the fray waxing eloquent on tho rights of man, the other side on the power of States.- Who shall say which fury burns with the whiter rage ? One party will take its stand on personal freedom, the other will take its stand on national strength. These forces are immortal. One age will fight for indepen- dence, a second will fight for empire, just as either the Saxon or the Latin spirit shall happen to prevail. When these two powers are in poise and balance, then, and then only, will the republic enjoy the highest share of freedom with the widest share of power. When the armies came into collision after the fall of Fort Sumter, the true banner of the war was raised, and the battle was accepted on a broader ground. The issue of the fight was then, — What principle shall the Great Republic write upon her flag ? Shall her society be founded on the principles of Chivalry, or on the principles of Equality? Shall industry be branded as ignoble ? Shall the !N"ew America be a slave empire or a free commonwealth ? Under these walls of Richmond the battle of that UNION. 489 principle was fairly fought; with a skill, a pride, a valor, on cither side to recall the charges at IvTaseby and at Marston Moor ; but the Cavaliers went down, and the Middle Ages then lost their final field. "When the reign of that martial and seceding spirit came to its close in the midst of rout and fire, tho milder spirit of Unity and peace, which had only slept in the heart of these American hosts, came up to tho front. A new order was commenced ; not in much strength at first ; not without fears and failings ; yet the reign of a nobler sentiment was opened, and every eye can see how far it is daily gaining in strength and favor; even though it has to contend against craft and passion more fatal than the sword. Years may elapse before this Union sentiment in the South is strong with all the riches of its strength; but the heralds have blown their horns, and the soldiers have raised their flag. Fulness of life must come with time; enough for the hour that the desire for Unity has been born afresh. Yes; here in Richmond, among these gallant swords- men of the South, on whom the war has fallen with its deadliest weight — men broken in their fortunes, widowed in their afibctions — many admit, and some proclaim, that they have made a surprising change of front. They are still the same men as before the war, but they have vrhecled about and set their faces another way. Some, it has been said, cannot make this change; they had their part in the past, and with the past they fell. Men whose last act was to burn this city, when they fled, leaving these blackened walls, these broken columns, these empty thorough- fares, as a message, a memorial of their despair, may think they have the right to be heard, and to be con- sidered in these Southern cities ; but it is coming to bo 490 NEW AMERICA. understood that if the past is theirs, for weal and woe, there is a future before the world in which they can have no share. The victors have set their mark upon them, so that they shall fill no further office of com- mand. Their friends may grieve over this exclusion; but the nation has to live ; and the rank and file of the South will not punish itself forever, even for the sake of those who, in their enthusiasm, may have misled it into death. In fact, the tide has turned ; the same sea rolls and swells ; but the ebb of separation has become the tide of Union. Though late, a goodly number of these planters see that their fiery haste, their brave impatience, their impetuous valor, had urged them on too fast and far; so fast, that in their rage for liberty they would have murdered law; so far, that in their quest for indepen- dence they would have sacrificed empire. In their passion to be free they had forgotten the saving power and virtue which belong to order, balance, equipoise of powers. To gain their darling wish — the right to stand alone — they would have rent society to shreds, and put the vv^orld back in its course a thousand years. They see their error now, and would undo their work; so far as such a deed can ever be done. A few still hug their pride and weakness; reading no promise in the skies ; and courting the fate of Poland for the South. Others among them may be silent ; scanning these crumbling streets, yon Yankee sentinels, those shouting negroes in the lane, with bitter smile ; but time is doing upon these sad spirits its healing work. They feel that, having lost their cause, they must yield to nature; — an Anglo-Saxon cannot sink into a Pole. I do not mean to say that here, in Richmond, the banner of Robert Lee is trodden in the mire : it is UNION. 491 not; neitlier should it be, since tbat banner gleamed only over men who had armed to defend a cause in which they found much glory and felt no shame. I only say that the banner of Lee has been rolled to its staff, and put away among things of the past, with much of the chivalric error, the romantic passion, of the South, laid up and smoothed among its folds. Good sense, if not fraternal love, has been restored to these gallant people; who see v/cll enough that the past is past, that rage is vain, that the fight is over, that a place in the country may yet be won. At pres- ent they are nothing ; less than the mean whites ; less than their own negroes. The situation cannot last. "Most of our young," said a Virginian to me just DOW, "are in favor of going in:" that is to say, of compromising the dispute, and taking their seats in Congress: "they do not like seeming to desert their old generals, but they want to live; and they won't stand out forever." These younger men, against whom the victors entertain no grudge, have nearly forgotten the past five years. Youth keeps its eyes in front, and there it sees nothing but the ilag. Hence it comes that in these very streets of Rich- mond, men who were yesterday on horseback, charging for the Confederate device, are now heard whispering of the Stars and Stripes, with a regret not feigned, an affection not put on. "Our grand mishap," said to mc a Georgian soldier, not an hour ago, "was our change of flag; we should have kept the old silk; we should have gone out boldly for the Union; we should have put yon Yankees on the outer side ; we should have taken our ground on the Constitution, making oar enemies the Seceders ; then, we should have won the fight, for all the West would have been with us ; and, instead of stamping about these blackened walls 492 NEW AMERICA. to-day^ we should have had our pickets at Niagara, our sentries at Faueuil Hall." Perhaps he is right. But is not this regret of the Georgian an after-stroke ? Was any such thought as that of liolding on b}'- the old flag, of preserving the Great Eepublic, to be found in the Southern States when the war came down ? ■The rage was then for separation. ' If wiser thoughts have come, have they not come by trial, in the wake of strife and loss? Those who now put their faith in Union, who look to the Capitol, to the White House, for safety, held in those years by another doctrine ; putting their trust in freedom, independence, person- ality. That dogma failed them ; isolation would not work; personality would not pay. Law and policy were against them ; the instincts of society were too strong for them. They fought for their scheme of separation ; they failed ; and, failing, lost both prize and stake; all that for which they had tempted fortune, nearly all that which they had put upon the die. Happily for the world, thej^ fiiilcd and lost; failed by a law of nature, lost by an ordinance of Heaven. '^o calamity in politics could have equalled the success of a slave empire, founded on the ruin of a strong republic. All free nations would have felt it, — all honest men would have suffered from it ; but even Avith their mistaken cause, their retrograde policy, their separatist banner, what a fight they made ! Men who can perish gloriously for their faith — however false that faith may be — will always seize the imagi- nation, hold the affections, of a gallant race. Fight- ing for a weak and failing cause, these planters of Virginia, of Alabama, of Mississippi, rode into battle as they would have hurried to a feast ; and many a man who wished them no profit in their raid and fi-ay, UNION. 493 could not help riding, as it were, in line with their foaming front, dashing with them into action, follow- ing their fiery coarse, with a flashing eye and a bound- ing pulse. Courage is electric. You caught the light from Jackson's sword, you flushed and panted after Stuart's plume. Their sin was not more striking than their valor. Loyal to their false gods, to their obsolete creed, they proved their personal honor by their deeds; these lords of every luxury under heaven, striving with hunger and with disease, and laying down their luxurious lives in ditch and breach. All round these walls, in sandy rifts, under forest-leaves, and by lonely pools, lie the bones of young men, of old men, who were once the pride, the strength of a thousand happy Anglo-Saxon homes. "Would that their sin could be covered up with a little sand ! Out on yon lovely slope of hill, from the brow of which the reddening woods and winding waters of beautiful Virginia gladden the eyes of men for leagues and leagues, the pious !N"orth has gathered into many beds, under many white stones, the ashes of her illus- trious dead ; of youths who came down from their farms in Ohio, from their mills in Vermont, from their schools in Massachusetts; the thew, the nerve, the brain of this great family of free-men; who came down, singing their hymns and hallelujahs; giving up ease, and peace, and love, and studj^, to save their country from division, from civil war, from political death. Singing their hymns, they fainted by the wayside : shouting their hallelujahs, they were stricken in the trench and in the field. New England gave its best and bravest to that slope. I know a street in Boston, from every house in which, death has taken spoil ; in the houses of poet and teacher, I have seen 42 494 NETT A MEM I CA. Rachel mourning with a proud joy for the sons who will never come back to her again. These heroes sleep on the hill-side, in the city which defied and slew them ; they have entered it as conquerors at last; and here they will keep their silent watch, the senti- nels of a bright and holy cause. All glory to them, now and for evermore ! Out, too, in yon swamps and wastes, by the deserted breastwork, by the fallen fort, by the rank river-margin, lie the ashes of a broken and ruined host ; of young men, of old warriors, who rode up from the cotton lands of Louisiana, from the country-houses of Georgia, from the rice-fields of Carolina, to fight for a cause in which they had learned to feel their right ; soldiers as honest, as brave, and proud as any of their stronger and keener foes. But the strong were right, and the right were strong ; and the weaker side went down in their tierce embrace. They fell together ; their duty done, their passion spent. Many a tender ofiice, many a solemn greeting, passed between these falling bro- thers, who spoke the same tongue, who muttered the same prayer, who owned one country and one God. They died on the same field, and whitened on the same earth. Still, here and there, some pious hand picks up their bones together, just as the warriors fell in battle, and laying them side by side, leave the two brothers who had come to strife, victor and vanquished, unionist and seceder, to sleep the long sleep in a com- mon bed. Would it were always thus! would that the pious North, noble in its charity as in its valor, would con- done the past ! The dead are past oflfending any more, and the pious tongue, in presence of a soldier's dust, should ask no question of state and party, but lay the UNION. 495 erring prodigal by his brother's side. Yon sunny Richmond slope, on which the setting sun appears to linger, tipping v/ith pink the fair white stones, should be for North and South alike a place of rest, a sign of the New America; an imperishable proof of their reconciliation, no less than an everlasting record of their strife. PUBLICATIONS OP J. B. LIPPINOOTT & CO. Will be sent by Mail on receipt of price. NOVELS BY "QUID A." Ohandos. A Novel, by "Ouida," author of "Strathmore," "Granville de Vigne," etc. 1 vol. 8vo. Cloth, $2.00. Contents. Book First. — Chapter I. Pythias; or, Mephistophelcs. II. "La Cometo et sa Queue." III. A Prime Minister at Homo. IV. The Quoca of Lilies. V. Poesie du Beau Sexe. VI. " The Many Years of Pain that Taught me Art." VIL Latet Anguis in Herba. VIII. A Jester who hated both Prince and Palace. Book Second. — Chap. I. Under the Waters of Nile. II. The Dark Diadem. III. Butterflies on the Pin. IV. "Straight was a Path of Gold for Him." V. Clarencieux. VI. The Poem among the Violets. VII. The Poem as Women read it. VIII. In the Rose Gardens. IX. The AVatchers for the Fall of Ilion. Book Third. — Chap. I. "Spes et Fortuna Valete." II. "Tout est perdu fors I'Honneur." III. The Love of Woman. IV. The Last Night among the Purples. V. The Death of the Titan. VI. "And the Spoilers came down." VII. The Few who were Faithful. VIII. The Crowd in the Cour des Princes. Book Fourth. — Chap. I. "Facilis Descensus Averni." II. "Where all Life Dies Death Lives." III. In the Net of the Iletiarius. IV. "Sin shall not have Dominion over You." Book Fifth. — Chap. I. In Exile. II. In Triumph. Book Sixth. — Chap. I. "Primavera! Gioventu dell' Anno !" II. Castalia. III. " Gioventu! Primavera delta Vita !" IV. " Seigneur! ayez Pitie !" Book Seventh. — Chap. I. " Do well unto Thyself and Men will speak good of Thee." II. The Throne of the Exile. III. " He who Endures Conquers." IV. " Qui a Offense no Pardonne Jamais." V. "Ne cherchcr qu'un Regard, qu'une Fleur, qu'un Soleil." VI. "Nihil Ilumani a me alienum pato." VII. "Pale, commo un beau Soir d'Automnc." VIII. " Record One Lost Soul More." Book Eighth. — ^Chap. I. The Claimant of the Porphyry Chamber. IL " M.agister de Vivis Lapidibus." III. " To Tell of Spring Tide Past." IV. "To Thine Own Self be True." V. The Codes of Arthur. VL "Et tu, Brute." VII. Liberia. VIIL Lex Talionis. IX. "King over Himself." Strathmore, or Wrought by his own Hand. By "OuiD.^," author of "Chando?," "Granville de Vigne, or Held in Bondage," etc. 1 voL 8vo. Cloth, $2.00. Granville de Vigne, or Held in Bondage. By "Odida," author of "Strathmore, or Wrought by his own Hand," "Chandos." etc. 1 vol. 8vo. Cloth, $2.00. PTJBLIOATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINOOTT & 00. Will be sent by Mail on receipt of price. Arabian JTiglit's Entertainments. 8vo. 100 engravings. So.uO. 12mo. SI. 75. The American Gentleman's Guide to Politeness and FasMon. By Henry Lunettes. 12mo. Clolb, §1.50. At Odds. A Novel. By the Baboness Tautphcecs. 12mo. Cloth, $1.75. The Sparrow Grass Papers, or Living in the Country. New Edition. By Frederic S. Cozzens. 12mo. $1.75. Libby Life. Experiences of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, Va., 1863-64. By LiEUT.-CoL. F. F. Cavada, U. S. V. 12iiio. Cloth, $1.50. Don Quixote De La Mancha. Complete in one vol. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. Dickens's Works, The Illustrated Library Edition. Beautifully printed in post oc- " iginal tavo, and carefully revised by the author. "With the or illustrations. Plckwiik Papers. 43 illustrations. 2 vols. Niclioliis ^i■-,kk*by. 3J iilu-tiations. 2 vols. . Maitin Cliu/.zUwit. 4U illustrations. 2 vols. 01(1 Curiosity Shop. 36 illustrations. 2 vols. . Itaniaby liuilge. 36 illustrations. 2 vols. . . • . SketcliL'S by Boz 39 illustratious. 1vol. Olivor Twir^t. 24 illustratious. 1 vol Donilicy and Son. 39 illustrations. 2 vols. DuviJ CopperfielJ. 40 illustrations. 2 vols. I'icturus from Italy, and Arai-ricaii Notes. 8 illustrations. Bii'aU House. 40 illustrations. 2 vols. .... Little Uoriit. 40 illustrations. 2 vols Christmas Kooks. 17 illustrations. 1 vol AT.aleofTwoCities. 16 illustr.ations. 1vol. Great Expectations. 8 illustrations. 1 vol. Dickens's "Works. Cheap and Uniform Edition. Handsomely printed in crown oct cloth, with frontispiece. 1vol. $2.00 '• 2.00 " 2.00 « 2.00 " 2.00 " 2.00 " 2.00 " 2.00 « 1.75 Pickwick Papers, Nichol.is NicUleby, Martn Ohuzzlowit, Uoiubey and Son, Davi.l Cnppsrfield, Bb-ak House, Little Dorrit, Barnaby J'uJgn, Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times, and Pictures from Italy, 1 ■ Oliver Twist, Sketches by Boz, Christmas Books, Great E.xpectations, A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, Uncommercial Traveller, $6.00 6.00 6.00 6.00 6.C0» 3.00 3.00 6,00 6.00 3.C0 6.00 6.C0 3.00 3.00 3.00 Gulliver's Travels into several Eemote Nations of the World. By Dean Swift, V/ith a Life of the Author. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LIPPINOOTT & 00. Will be sent by Mail on receipt of price. Bulwer's Novels. A New Library Edition of the Works of Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer 12mo., ia 42 vols., viz.: The Caxton Family, 2 toIs. My .Nov.l, 4 " What will he do with it ? 3 '' Dcvcroiix, 2 " Tlie Last Days of Pompeii, 2 " Rienzi, 2 " Leila Calderon, 1 " The LastoftheBarona, 2 " Harold, 2 " Pilgrims of the Khine, 1 " Zanoni, 2 ^ I'elham, 2 The Disowned, 2 Paul Clifford, 2 G. dolphin, 1 Ernest MaltraverB— First Part, 2 Ernest Maltravers — Second Part (i.e. Alice), 2 Nif;ht and Morning, 2 Lucrttia, 2 A Strange Story, 2 Each work furnished separately if desired. Neat cloth, per vol., $1.25; library style, $1.60; half call, S2.50; half calf, gilt, extra, marble edges, $2.75. Hospital Life ; From November, 1861, to August, 1863. 'With an Introduction by Bishop Potter. 12mo. $1.25. May and December. A Tale of Wedded Life. By Mrs. IIxjbback. 12mo. Cloth, $1.76. A Kebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, During the entire Four Years of the existence of the Confederate Government. By J. B. Jones, Clerk in the War Department of the Government of the Confederate States. In two vols., crown 8vo. $5.50. The Ladies' Guide to Perfect Beauty. By Alexander Walker, M.D., LL.D. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. Mayhew's Illustrated Horse Management. Embellished wiih more than 400 Engravings from Original Designs made expressly for this work. By Edward Mayhew, M.R C. V.S. One vol. 8vo. Cloth, $3.00. Mayhew's Illustrated Horse Doctor. With more than 400 Pictorial representations of the various dis- eases to which the equine race is subjected; together with the latest Mode of Treatment and all the requisite Prescriptions written in plain English. By Edward Mayhew, M.B.C.V.S. 1 vol. 8vo. Cloth, $3.00. Goldsmith's Complete Works. Edited by James Prior. With four Vignettes engraved on steel. 4 vols. 12mo. Cloth, $6.00; sheep, library style, $7.00; half calf, neat, $11.00; half calf, gilt, extra, $12.00. Adventures of Gil Bias of Santillane. Translated from the French of Le Sage. By T. Smollet, M.D. With an account of the Author's Life, 12mo. Cloth, $1.60. PUBLICATIONS OP J. B. LIPPINOOTT & 00. "Will be sent by Mail on receipt of price. lippincott's pronouncing gazet- teeh of the would, OR GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. Revised Edition, with an Appendix containing nearly ten thousand new notices, and the most recent Statistical Informa- tion, according to the latest Census Returns, of the United States and Foreign Countries. Lippincott's Pronouncing Gazetteer gives — I. — A Descriptive notice of the Countries, Islands, Rivers, Mountains, Cities, Towns, etc., in every part of the Globe, with the most Recent and Authentic Information. II. — The Names of all Important places, etc., both in their Native and Foreign Languages, with the Pronunciation of the same — a Feature never attempted in any other Work. III. — The Classical Names of all Ancient Places, so far as they can be accurately ascertained from the best Authori- ties. IV. — A Complete Etymological Vocabulary of Geographical Names. V. — An elaborate Introduction, explanatory of the Principles of Pronunciation of Names in the Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh Lan- guages. Comprised in a volume of over two thousand three hundred imperial octavo pages. Price, $10.00. Fkom the Hon. Horace Mann, LL.D., Late President of Antioch College. I have had your Pronouncing Gazetteer of the World before mo for some weeks. Having long felt the necessity of a work of this kind, I have spent no small amount of time in e.xamining yours. It seems to me so important to have a comprehensive and authentic gazetteer in all our colleges, academies, and schools, that I am in- duced in this instance to depart from my general rule in regard to giving recommendations. Your work has evidently been prepared with immense labor ; and it exhibits proofs from beginning to end that knowledge has presided over its execution. The rising genera- tion will bo greatly benefited, both in the accuracy and extent of their information, should your work be kept as a book of reference on the table of every professor and teacher in the country.