176

A MOURNFUL FALLING OFF.

worst of all is, that a people who made it their principle and their pride to shun all interference of the civil magistrate, on any occasion whatever, have appealed to the laws against one another with the bitterest recrimination. Oh, friends! what a lapse was there. When I left, one of the state legislatures (that of New Jersey) had tried to settle their disputes about the contested property, by an award on the share-and-share-alike principle; but the orthodox were quite indignant at this, although by far the fewer number, and were preparing to resist it to the utmost. "Ichabod, Ichabod! the glory hath departed from our house."

PART of the last letter related to the Society of Friends; the present will be devoted to the objects of their especial care, our fellow-men of the Negro race, who have few others to look to for protection in America. The Quakers alone, of all the many denominations of a religion of love and good-will to man, furnish the means of their secular or religious improvement. By all the others (I speak of them collectively, not individually) they are denied sympathy in life, and after death a grave. The Quakers, on the contrary, strive zealously to advance their interests in every way. Does an unprincipled slaveowner set up a claim to deprive a free negro of his liberty, he finds a fund set apart by the Friends to defend his cause. Is he out of employ, they find him work; is he in prison, they comfort him, and, if worthy, try to obtain his release; is he sick, they visit him. They open numerous schools for his instruction, or for that of his offspring.

To do all these things, and more, in the face of the American world, requires no small degree of moral courage, as well as of active humanity.

The possible incorporation of the two races is

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178

A BLACK BUSINESS. 2

looked upon with horror. Any white who would stoop to espouse a woman with negro blood in her veins, would find himself excluded from all respectable, not to say genteel, society; no matter how rich or how accomplished the party might be. To use the emphatic words of one of their writers, "He might, by such ready means, degrade himself for ever, but could never exalt her for a moment."

A few weeks before my arrival in Philadelphia some excesses took place, arising from the mobbish antipathy to the men of colour, which might have been the means of setting the whole country in a flame. It appeared that a murder had been committed by a negro servant on his master, for which he had then been arrested, and was afterwards in due time and form punished for his crime. This unlucky affair caused a deal of excitement; and the odium, which should have been in reason confined to the guilty individual, was extended, by the savage mob, to all of his colour. After insulting and cruelly beating numbers of black men in the public places of Philadelphia, and hunting them about like wild beasts every where, one large body went to the quarter of the city principally inhabited by them, pulled down some of their dwellings over the heads of the inmates, and burnt others. Many of the coloured people were so grievously maltreated, that several died. Finding matters had got to these extremities, and dreading they might get worse, a considerable portion of the more able-bodied men of colour left the city, took up a position near it,

A WORD TO THE WISE.

179

and began to arm. There they remained three days, rapidly adding to their numbers and means of resistance or offence. By this time the popular effervescence having a little subsided, the wiser heads of the city sent to treat with the fugitives, and persuaded them to return, on conditioning to obtain for them "indemnity for the past, and security for the future." They did return; and in due course application was made to the State legislature for reparation of the damage sustained from lawless devastation; but, as had been usual on such occasions, it was denied.

Political rights they have none, in any of the free States. No personal taxes are levied on them, and they do not vote. In Pennsylvania, there is, indeed, no positive law to prevent their taking part in elections; and knowing this, I asked a Philadelphian why they did not come to the poll as others did? His answer was significant, "Just let them try!" There is a strange law in some, if not all, of the slave states, which allows a slave-holder additional votes in right of his slaves, and those increase in proportion to the number of these he may happen to own. Our "animal parliament and universal sufferings" people might take a hint from this inverted system of representation, and let every coster-monger have a vote for his donkey. It would be reasonable, and not carry reduplication of suffrage so far as the American system.

Thus much for their want of political rights. Of their deprivation of social rights I have already said

180

AMERICAN INTOLERANCE.

somewhat; what remains to be said might be summed up in a few words. Nobody will travel in the same coach, no one will sit in the same church, with them; no man will learn them a trade; no one will teach a school where they are; no preacher will serve as a pastor to them; nobody will allow his dead to be buried in the same ground with theirs. In short, every circle, even the lowest, will shun the approaches of the highest of theirs.

I was a spectator once of the first-mentioned species of exclusion, one day, on the rail-road from Philadelphia to Norristown. The weather was oppressively hot; and some coloured men and women, most respectably dressed and of civil manners, came up and asked the conductors, in a very humble tone, if they could be accommodated in any part of the train? They had been out on a country excursion, and seemed tired; but no one shewed the least inclination to receive them, although there were a good many vacant places in almost every carriage on the line. At last I got up, and said we could accommodate five or six of them in ours, and if the rest passed farther on, no doubt they might all get places. Upon which more than one of my fellowtravellers said I might give up my place if I chose, but " no niggers should come there." I of course sat down; to argue the matter would have been of no use to the poor outcasts, and might have been harmful to me. The conductors looked on while this was passing, but did not urge the point one way or other. Still I could see they were anxious to