Note: This particular diary entry–a document written in 1861–includes terms and topics that may be offensive to many today. No attempt will be made to censor or edit 19th-century material to today’s standards.
May 10th.—The cabin of one of these steamers, in the month of May, is not favorable to sleep. The wooden beams of the engines creek and scream “consumedly,” and the great engines themselves throb as if they would break through their thin, pulse covers of pine,—and the whistle sounds, and the calliope shrieks out “Dixie” incessantly. So, when I was up and dressed, breakfast was over, and I had an opportunity of seeing the slaves on board, male and female, acting as stewards and stewardesses, at their morning meal, which they took with much good spirits and decorum. They were nicely dressed—clean and neat. I was forced to admit to myself that their Ashantee grandsires and grandmothers, or their Kroo and Dahomey progenitors were certainly less comfortable and well clad, and that these slaves had other social advantages, though I could not recognize the force of the Bishop of Georgia’s assertion, that from slavery must come the sole hope of, and machinery for, the evangelization of Africa. I confess I would not give much for the influence of the stewards and stewardesses in Christianizing the blacks.
The river, the scenery, and the scenes were just the same as yesterday’s—high banks, cotton-slides, wooding stations, cane-brakes—and a very miserable negro population, if the specimens of women and children at the landings fairly represented the mass of the slaves. They were in strong contrast to the comfortable, well-dressed domestic slaves on board, and it can well be imagined there is a wide difference between the classes, and that those condemned to work in the open fields must suffer exceedingly.
A passenger told us the captain’s story. A number of planters, the narrator among them, subscribed a thousand dollars each to get up a vessel for the purpose of running a cargo of slaves, with the understanding they were to pay so much for the vessel, and so much per head if she succeeded, and so much if she was taken or lost. The vessel made her voyage to the coast, was laden with native Africans, and in due time made her appearance off Mobile. The collector heard of her, but, oddly enough, the sheriff was not about at the time, the United States’ Marshal was away, and as the vessel could not be seen next morning, it was fair to suppose she had gone up the river, or somewhere or another. But it so happened that Captain Maher, then commanding a river steamer called the Czar (a name once very appropriate for the work, but since the serf emancipation rather out of place), found himself in the neighborhood of the brig about nightfall; next morning, indeed, the Czar was at her moorings in the river; but Captain Maher, began to grow rich, he had fine negroes fresh run on his land, and bought fresh acres, and finally built the “Southern Republic.” The planters asked him for their share of the slaves. Captain Maher laughed pleasantly; he did not understand what they meant. If he had done anything wrong, they had their legal remedy. They were completely beaten; for they could not have recourse to the tribunals in a case which rendered them liable to capital punishment. And so Captain Maher, as an act of grace, gave them a few old niggers, and kept the rest of the cargo.
It was worth while to see the leer with which he listened to this story about himself, “Wall now! You think them niggers I’ve abord came from Africa! I’ll show you. Jist come up here, Bully!” A boy of some twelve years of age, stout, fat, nearly naked, came up to us; his color was jet black, his wool close as felt, his cheeks were marked with regular parallel scars, and his teeth very white, looked as if they had been filed to a point, his belly was slightly protuberant, and his chest was marked with tracings of tattoo marks.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“My name Bully.”
“Where were you born?”
“Me born Sout Karliner, sar!”
“There, you see he wasn’t taken from Africa,” exclaimed the Captain, knowingly. “I’ve a lot of these black South Caroliny niggers abord, haven’t I, Bully?”
“Yas, sar.”
“Are you happy, Bully?”
“Yas, sar.”
“Show how you’re happy.”
Here the boy rubbed his stomach, and grinning with delight, said, “Yummy! yummy! plenty belly full.”
“That’s what I call a real happy feelosophical chap,” quoth the Captain. “I guess you’ve got a lot in your country can’t pat their stomachs and say, ‘yummy, yummy, plenty belly full?'”
“Where did he get those marks on his face?”
“Oh, them? Wall, it’s a way them nigger women has of marking their children to know them; isn’t it, Bully?”
“Yas, sar! me ‘spose so!”
“And on his chest!”
“Wall, r’ally I do b’l’eve them’s marks agin the smallpox.”
“Why are his teeth filed ? ”
“Ah, there now! You’d never have guessed it; Bully done that himself, for the greater ease of biting his vittels.”
In fact, the lad, and a good many of the hands, were the results of Captain Maher’s little sail in the Czar.
“We’re obleeged to let ’em in some times to keep up the balance agin the niggers you run into Canaydy.”
From 1848 to 1852 there were no slaves run; but since the migrations to Canada and the personal liberty laws, it has been found profitable to run them. There is a bucolic ferocity about these Southern people which will stand them good stead in the shock of battle. How the Spartans would have fought against any barbarians who came to emancipate their slaves, or the Romans have smitten those who would manumit slave and creditor together!
To-night, on the lower deck, amid wood faggots, and barrels, a dance of negroes was arranged by an enthusiast, who desired to show how “happy they were.” That is the favorite theme of the Southerners; the gallant Captain Maher becomes quite eloquent when he points to Bully’s prominent “yummy,” and descants on the misery of his condition if he had been left to the precarious chances of obtaining such developments in his native land; then turns a quid, and, as if uttering some sacred refrain to the universal hymn of the South, says, “Yes, sir, they’re the happiest people on the face of the airth!”
There was a fiddler, and also a banjo-player, who played uncouth music to the clumsiest of dances, which it would be insulting to compare to the worst Irish jig, and the men with immense gravity and great effusion of sudor, shuffled, and cut, and heeled and buckled to each other with an overwhelming solemnity, till the rum-bottle warmed them up to the lighter graces of the dance, when they became quite overpowering. “Yes, sir, jist look at them how they’re enjoying it; they’re the happiest people on the face of the airth.” When “wooding” and firing up they don’t seem to be in the possession of the same exquisite felicity.