An Unoficial Patriot Part 1

An Unoficial Patriot.

by Helen Gardener.

CHAPTER I.--A SON OF VIRGINIA.

Griffith Davenport was a clergyman. I tell you this at the outset, so that you may be prepared to take sides with or against him, as is your trend and temperament. Perhaps, too, it is just as well for me to make another statement, which shall count in his favor or to his disadvantage, according to your own prejudices or convictions. He was a Southern man. He had been a slave-owner, and now he was neither the one nor the other. But in connection with, and in explanation of these last-mentioned facts, I may say that he had been a law-breaker in his native State, and was, at the very time of which I tell you, evading the law in the State of his adoption.

Both of these facts were the direct results of having been born to slave-ownership, and, at the same time, with a conscience which was of, and in harmony with, a different lat.i.tude and heredity. I trust that you will not infer from this last remark that I am of the opinion that the conscience of the Northern habitant is of more delicate fiber than is that of his Southern brother, who is of the same mental and social grade; for nothing could be farther from either the facts or my intentions herein. But that it is of a different type and trend is equally beyond controversy. The p.r.i.c.kings of the one are as regular and as incessant, no doubt, as are those of the other; but the stimulating causes have different roots. Perhaps, too, it may sound strange to you to hear of one who can be spoken of as having a somewhat sensitive conscience and at the same time as being both a law-breaker and a law-evader. But certain it is, that with a less primitive conception of laws and of men, you will be able to adjust, to a nicety, the ideas therein conveyed, and also to realize how true it is that times, conditions, and environment sometimes determine the standard by which the rightfulness or wrongfulness of conduct is measured, and that it is quite within the possibilities for a man to be at once a law-breaker and a good man, or a law-keeper and a bad one.

But I am not intending to warp your judgment in advance, and you are to remember that whatever my opinion of the quality of the Rev. Griffith Davenport's conduct may be, there is another side to the matter, and that I shall not take it greatly to heart if you should find yourself on the other side.

But if, as I have sometimes heard readers say--who looked upon themselves as of a somewhat superior order--you do not take an interest in people who have placed themselves outside of the beaten pathway of legal regularity, it will be just as well for you to lay this little story aside now, for, as I have said, it is a story of a clergyman, a slave-holder, a law-breaker, and a law-evader, which, I admit, does not at the first blush present a picture to the mind of a person in whom you and I, my lofty and immaculate friend, would be greatly interested, or with whom we would care to a.s.sociate for any protracted period. Still, I intend to tell the story, and in order to give you a perfectly clear idea of how all the more important events in this curiously complicated life came about, I shall be compelled to go back to the boyhood of young Davenport, so that you may catch a glimpse of the life and training, which were a prelude and a preparation--if you do not wish to look upon them as exactly a justification--of and for the later years of the life, which experienced such strange trials, complications and vicissitudes.

It was in the year eighteen hundred and twenty-four that the great sea of Methodism first began to beat with a force that was like that of a succession of mighty tidal waves upon the previously placid State of Virginia. Young Davenport had, at that time, just turned his fifteenth year, but it was not until nearly four years later, when the tide of interest and excitement had swept with a power and influence impossible to picture in these days of religious indifference and critical inquiry, into the homes and over the barriers of long-established things, that young Griffith's home felt the invasion to be a thing which it behooved gentlemen to consider seriously, or even to recognize as existing, if one may so express it, in an official sense.

As I suggested before, it would be difficult, in these later and less emotional days, when every school-boy knows of doubts and questionings in the minds of his elders, to picture adequately the serene lack of all such doubts and questionings in Griffith Davenport's boyhood.

To be sure there were, and, I venture to a.s.sume, always had been, disagreement and disputes over forms, methods, and meanings; but these were not fundamental doubts of fundamental beliefs, of which it would be entirely safe to say that young Davenport had never in his whole life heard one little doubt expressed or intimated, or that a question existed that could tend to make any one suspect that there were or could be unsettled realms in the system and plan of salvation as laid down by Christianity. He supposed, of course, that Christianity was an incontrovertible, fixed, and final religion. Different sects he knew there were, but all of these accepted the basic principle of Christianity. All sprang from the same root. Some grew eastward, some westward, and some made straight for heaven like the center shaft of a great oak; but each and all were true limbs of the same healthful trunk whose roots found anchorage in the bed-rock of eternal truth. He did not know that there were other trees quite as vigorous and even more expansive, each of which had sprung from the seed of human longing to solve the unsolvable. The "heathen" he had heard of, of course, in a condemnatory or pitying way, but he did not know or think of their worship as "religion." It was "fetichism," idolatry, superst.i.tion. Of Deists, he had heard, if at all, but vaguely; for it must be remembered that in the year of our blessed Lord eighteen hundred and twenty-seven the name of that famous Deist, Thomas Paine, who had done so much for the liberty and dignity of the great new nation, was not honored as it is to-day, and, indeed, so dense was the philosophical ignorance of that time, that the mention of the name of the author-hero of the Revolution was seldom made except in execration and contumely. Even of the Jews, from whom his religion came, Griffith had heard no good. They had slain the Christ, had they not? Their own G.o.d condemned the act, did he not?

Young Davenport supposed that this was all true. He also supposed that because of a blunder, made in ignorance and pa.s.sion, in an age long past, a whole race had ever since been under the chastising hand of a just Jehovah, who had decreed that their humiliation and the expiation of the fatal blunder should be eternal. That there were Jews who were to-day good, devout and religious who still approved the att.i.tude of Pilate toward the Christ, he did not know. He counted this cla.s.s, therefore, as in some sort, Christians also. Mistaken in method, no doubt; superst.i.tious and blundering perhaps; but still secretly filled with sorrow and shame for the awful crime of their race, and accepting the verdict of G.o.d and the disciplining punishment of time, he had no doubt of their final acceptance of what he believed established as eternal Truth, and their consequent redemption and salvation. The easy-going, gentle Episcopalianism of his home-training, with its morning and evening, perfunctory, family prayers, its "table grace" and its Sunday service, where all the leading families of the county were to be seen, and where the Rector read with so much finish and the choir sang so divinely, the same old hymns, week after week, had so far been as much a part of his life,--and were accepted as mechanically,--as were the daily meals, the unpaid negro labor, and the fact that his father, the old "Squire," sat in the best pew, because he had built and endowed the finest church in the State.

All these things had come to Griffith as quite a matter of course; as some equally important things have come to you and to me--and not at all as matter of surprise or as questions for argument.

That his father, the old major, swore roundly, from time to time, at the slaves, did not appeal to the boy's mind as either strange or reprehensible; so true is it that those things which come to us gradually, and in the regular order of events, do not arouse within us doubts and questionings as do sudden or startling additions to our development or intellectual equipment, when thrust unexpectedly in upon our ordinary surroundings. Such moral or social questions as were involved in the ownership of slaves had, up to that time, produced no more mental qualms in the boy than have the same questions as to ownership of lands or of horses upon you or me at the present time.

Jerry had been Griffith's own particular "boy" ever since he could remember, and, although Jerry was the older of the two, it would be wholly unfair to all parties concerned not to state clearly and fully that the righteousness and inevitability of the relationship of owned and owner, had no more sinister meaning for Jerry than it had for his young "Mos' Grif." So p.r.o.ne are we all to accept as a finality that to which custom has inured us.

Was Jerry an Episcopalian? Most a.s.suredly! Were not all of the Davenports members of the established order in all things? And was not Jerry a Davenport? Not one negro on the whole plantation had ever for one little moment thought of himself as other than an Episcopalian,--in so far as the Almighty would permit one whose skin was black to be of the elect. They one and all felt a real and eager pride in the social and religious status of the Davenports, and had never even harbored a doubt that they would be permitted to polish the harps and hold the horses of that fortunate family when all should again be reunited in that better world, where all might be free but not equal--for "as one star differed from another," etc. No different dreams had ever, so far, visited master or slave.

"I could never be happy in heaven without Jerry," had settled the question in Griffith's mind, for of course his own destination was sure.

And the negro felt equally secure when he thought, "Mos' Grif ain't gwine ter go nowhah widout me. n.o.body else ain't gwine ter take cahr ob him. n.o.body else know how."

But the unsettling times which brought Methodism, in a great and overwhelming wave, into the ranks of established things, brought also mutterings and perplexities and awakenings of another sort. Aroused energies, stimulated consciences, excited mentalities are ever likely to find varying outlets. Progressive movements seldom travel singly, and so it came about that, mingled with the new religious unrest, there were other and, perhaps you will say, graver questions so inextricably joined, in some minds that the one appeared to be the root and cause of the other.

"Is slavery right? If it is right for the laity, at least, is it not wrong for one who is an apostle of the Son of G.o.d, who had not where to lay His head? Should black men be free men?" and all the disturbing horde of questions which followed in the train of the new religion, began to float, at first in intangible ways, in the air. A little later they took form in scowl or hasty word, and at last crept into sermons, social discussions and legislative deliberations, as by degrees the echo of these latter floated down from Washington or filtered through other sources, from the Border States, where the irrepressible conflict had arisen in a new form to vex the souls and arouse the pa.s.sions of men.

The pressing question of free soil or slave extension had already begun to urge itself upon the public mind and to hara.s.s the Border States, finding utterance for or against that Congressional measure known as the Missouri Compromise Bill. Young Griffith Davenport had spent his seventeen years in an atmosphere of scholarly investigation and calm, where little of even the echoes of these disturbing influences had come.

His home was a comfortable one--indeed, the finest in all that part of the valley; the library quite unusual in extent and quality for the time and place. Grif's tutor was a University man, his pleasures those of a country 'squire; for in Virginia, as in England, the office of "esquire," or justice of the peace, was wont to pa.s.s from father to eldest son, in families of consideration; and, indeed, at that early age Grif's father had, by degrees, turned the duties of the office over to the boy, until now no one expected to consult the "old 'squire" upon any ordinary topic. The "young 'squire" settled it, whether it were a dispute over dog-slain sheep or a misunderstanding about the road tax.

Upon this placid, "established" finality of existence it was, then, which descended a cyclone. Formalism in religion had run its course. The protest was swift, impa.s.sioned, sincere. Vigorous, earnest, but often unlearned men sprang into prominence at a single bound. Arguments arose.

Men began to ask if the Almighty was pleased with forms in which the soul was dead--if mere words, and not sincere emotion of the heart, gratified G.o.d. Was it worship to simply read or repeat the words of another? Must not one's own soul, mind and heart furnish the key, as well as the medium, to aid in real devotion? Had the letter killed the spirit?

Young Griffith heard. The ideas fascinated him. Oaths from his father's lips struck him with a new meaning and a different force. Whereas they had been mere vocal emphasis, now they were fearful maledictions--and from a leading Christian, _the_ leading Christian of the county!

Griffith pondered, trembled, listened again to the new religious teachers--to whose meetings he had, at first, gone in a spirit of mild fun, not in the least reprobated by his father--and had, at last, tremblingly, pa.s.sionately believed.

CHAPTER II.

_"I paint him in character."_--Shakespeare

That a Davenport should seriously contemplate leaving the "Mother Church." as the devotees of the Anglican establishment were given to calling their branch of the real Roman mother, was a proposition too absurd to be considered; and the old Major met his son's first suggestions, wherein this tendency was indicated, as the mere vaporings of a restless, unformed boy. He laughed loudly, guyed his son openly, and inquired jocosely which one of the pretty Methodist girls had struck his fancy.

"If it turns out to be serious, Grif, and you marry her, she will, as a matter of course, transfer her membership to the Mother Church. A true wife always follows her husband in all things. 'Thy people shall be my people, and thy G.o.d my G.o.d,' you know, Grif. Good old saying. Bible truth, my son. But who is the happy girl, you young scamp? There is rather a paucity of thoroughbreds among the Methodists, as they call this new craze. Don't make _that_ kind of a mistake, my boy, whatever else you do. Better keep inside the paddock."

The old Major chuckled, and, turning on his heel, left his son covered with confusion, and with a sense of impotent zeal and conviction to which he could not or dared not give voice.

That this question of a truer, warmer, more personally stirring religious life did not touch a single responsive chord in the Major's nature, filled the son, anew, with misgivings. At first, these questionings led him to doubt himself, and to wonder if it could, after all, be possible that his own youth, inexperience and provincialism might really not lie at the root of his new unrest. He went to the Methodist meetings with a fresh determination to be serenely critical, and not to yield to the onrush of emotion which had grown so strong within him as he had listened, in the past, to the pa.s.sionate and often ruggedly-eloquent appeals of the pioneers of the new faith--or, perhaps, it were better to say, to the new expression of the old faith. He gave up his extra Latin lessons, which had been his delight and the pride of his tutor and of his family, that he might have these hours for the study of the Bible and the few other books carried by the colporteurs or the circuit riders, who were beginning to overrun the State.

The old Major disapproved, but it was not his way to discuss matters with his family; and it may be doubted, indeed, if the Major grasped the significance and force of the tide which had overtaken his son, as it had rushed with the power of a flood over his beloved Virginia and left in its wake a tremendous unrest, and carried before it many of the most sincere and forceful characters and questions. Beyond a few twittings and an occasional growl, therefore, the old Major had ignored his son's gradual withdrawal from the ancient forms and functions and the fact that almost every Sunday morning, of late, had found the boy absent from the family pew and present two miles up the valley at the little log meeting-house of the Methodists. He was unprepared, therefore, to face the question seriously, when finally told by the boy's mother that Grif had decided that on his nineteenth birthday he would be baptized, and that he intended to enter the ministry as a circuit rider.

The joke struck the Major as good above the average. He laughed long and loud. He chuckled within himself all day. When evening came and Griffith appeared at the table the Major was too full of mirth and derision to content himself with his usual banter.

"Your mothah inforhms me," he began with the ironical touch in his tone held well under the sparkle of humor. "Your mothah inforhms me that to-morrow is your nineteenth birthday, you long-legged young gosling, and that you contemplate celebrating it by trans.m.u.ting yourself into a Methodist a.s.s with leather lungs and the manners, sir,--and the habits, sir, of--of--of a d.a.m.ned Yankee!"

As the Major had halted for words and the picture of his son as a circuit rider arose before him as a reality and not as a joke, his ire had gotten the better of his humor. The picture he had conjured up in his own mind of this son of his in the new social relations sure to result from the contemplated change of faith swamped the old Major's sense of the absurdity of the situation in a sudden feeling of indignation and chagrin, and the sound of his own unusual words did the rest.

Griffith looked up at his father in blank surprise. His mother said, gently, "Majah! Majah!" But the old 'squire's sudden plunge into anger had him in its grip. He grew more and more excited as his own words stirred him.

"Yes, sir, like a d.a.m.ned northern tackey that comes down here amongst respectable people to talk to n.i.g.g.e.rs, and preach, as they call their ranting, to the white trash that never owned a n.i.g.g.e.r in their whole worthless lives, and tell'em about the 'unrighteousness' of slavery! Why don't they read their Bibles if they know enough to read? _It_ teaches slavery plain enough--'Servants obey your masters in all things,' and 'If a man sell his servant,' and 'His servant is his money,' and a good many more! Why don't they read their Bibles, I say, and shout if they want to, and attend to their own business? n.o.body wants their long noses down here amongst reputable people, sowing seeds of riot and rebellion among the n.i.g.g.e.rs!" The Major had forgotten his original point but it came back to him as Grif began to speak.

"But, sir-"

"But, sir!" he said, rising from his chair in his excitement, "don't 'but, sir,' me! I'm disgusted and ashamed, sir! Ashamed from the bottom of my hawt, that a son of mine--a Davenport--could for one moment contemplate this infernal piece of folly! A circuit rider, indeed! A d.a.m.ned disturber of n.i.g.g.e.rs! A man with, no traditions! Shouting and having fits and leading weak-minded women and girls, and weaker-minded boys and n.i.g.g.e.rs into unpardonable, disgraceful antics and calling it religion! Actually having the effrontery to call it religion! It's nothing but infernal rascality in half the cases and pitiable insanity in the other half, and if I'd been doing my duty as a 'squire I'd have taken the whole pestiferous lot up and put one set in jail and the other set in an asylum, long ago! Look at'em! Ducking 'converts,' as they call their dupes, in the creek! Perfectly disgraceful, sir! I forbid you to go about their meetings again, sir! Yes, sir, once and for all, I forbid it!"

The Major brought his fist down on the table with a bang that set the fine china rattling and added the last straw of astonishment and discomfort to the unusual family jar; for few indeed had ever been the occasions upon which even a mild degree of paternal authority had not been so quickly followed by ready and willing compliance that an outbreak of anything like real temper or authoritative command--other than at or toward the slaves--had been hardly within Grif's memory.

The boy arose, trembling and pale, and leaving his untouched plate of choice food before him turned to leave the room.

"Come back here, sir!" commanded the old Major. "Take your seat, sir, and eat your supper, sir, and--"

Mrs. Davenport burst into tears. The boy hesitated, parted his lips as if to speak, looked at his mother, and with a sudden movement of his hand toward a little book which he always carried these later days in his breast-pocket, he stepped to his mother's side. There was a great lump in his throat. He was straggling for mastery of himself but his voice broke into a sob as he said:

"'He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me.'" He kissed his mother's forehead and pa.s.sed swiftly out of the room. His horse stood at the front gate waiting the usual evening canter. Griffith threw his long leg over the saddle, and said to Jerry, who stood holding the bridle of his own horse, ready to follow as was his custom: "I don't want you to-night, Jerry. Stay at home.

Good-night," and rode away into the twilight.

It would be difficult to say just what Griffith's plan was. Indeed, it had all been so sudden and so out of the ordinary trend of his life, that there was a numb whirl of excitement, of pain and of blind impulse too fresh within him to permit of anything like consecutive thought.

But, with Grif, as with most of us when the crises of our lives come, fate or chance or conditions have taken the reins to drive us. We are fond of saying--and while we are young we believe--that we decided thus or thus; that we converted that condition or this disaster into an opportunity and formed our lives upon such and such a model. All of which is--as a rule--mere fond self-gratulation. The fact is, although it may wound our pride to acknowledge it, that we followed the line of least resistance (all things being considered, our own natures included) and events did the rest. And so when Grif turned an angle in the road, two miles from home, and came suddenly upon the circuit rider, who was to baptize the new converts on the following day, and when Brother Prout took it for granted that Grif was on his way to the place of gathering in order to be present at the preliminary meeting, it seemed to Grif that he had originally started from home with that object in view. His thoughts began to center around that idea. The pain and shock of the home-quarrel, which he had simply started out to ride off, to think over, to prepare to meet on the morrow, gradually faded into a dull hurt, which made the phrases and quotations and exhortations of Brother Prout sound like friendly and personal utterances of soothing and of paternal advice, and so the two miles stretched into ten and the camp-ground was reached, and for Griffith, the die was cast.

CHAPTER III.--THE IRONY OF FATE.