The Brothers' War Part 9

"Run, n.i.g.g.e.r, run, patroller get you."

The riotous merriment of this air can be fully appreciated only by one who has heard Cuffee sing it at the quarters while picking his banjo. It completely confutes the charge often made that the patrol law was a cruel one. To the negro, the execution of that law was more of fun and frolic than punishment. Let this air, and all the others to which the slaves used to dance, be meditated by those, if there are such, who incline to believe that Professor DuBois has really detected, as he seriously contends, in the negro melodies of the old south deep sorrow over slavery. If miserable conditions give character to musical expression, the songs, if any, that now come forth spontaneously from the ma.s.s of southern negroes--that is, from those of the lower cla.s.s, which cla.s.s will be described later herein--ought to be sadder than the tears of Simonides.

My reader who has his memory stored with the raw-head and b.l.o.o.d.y bones fiction of abolitionists who had never set foot on an inch of slave territory, probably thinks of bloodhounds, and wonders if I will be frank enough to mention them. He has been made to believe that runaway slaves often had the flesh torn from their bones by these dogs. I witnessed several chases of runaways, and in every one, when the negro was overtaken by the dogs, he was in a tree far above their reach. Think about it, and bring it home to yourself. Put yourself in the runaway's place, you would surely understand as well as a common house cat does how to avoid pursuing dogs. Negro dogs, as they were called, were bred to be far more slow than fox dogs. The tricks of the runaway would put the latter at fault so often that they could hardly ever catch him. Further, the packs of negro dogs were usually too small to overpower a stout negro. He was often armed with a scythe-blade for use if overtaken where he could not find a tree. When he could keep ahead no longer he preferred taking refuge to fighting with the dogs. He knew he could kill or disable only the few that would rush in recklessly, and that the others would stay too far from him to be hurt and yet keep him at bay. He was now going to be caught, and he would think it better not to provoke the ire of the owners by killing or injuring their dogs.

The negro hunted the 'possum and 'c.o.o.n by night and the hare--the rabbit, as everybody called it--on Sundays, half-holidays, and Christmas, either with his young master or without him, and always with the dogs; which he thus learned to control. A negro woman cooked the corn-bread and pot-liquor, with which they were fed by her or some other slave. They were always waiting near when the slaves ate by day in the fields or at all hours of night in their cabins, and many a bit was thrown to them. Usually there was the greatest friendship between the dogs on the plantation, those intended for chasing runaways included, and the negroes. It was great entertainment for a negro, at the command of his master, to give the young negro dogs a race, as it was called. These races were frequent, and they were the entire training of the dogs for their business. A hunting dog when lost will track his master. And many a runaway was caught by dogs which he was in the habit of feeding and hunting with. The average negro of those days, prowling so much at night as he did, necessarily became a most expert dog-tamer. How often I have been diverted with this sight! A strange negro, coming on some errand, intrepidly opens the front gate and enters the yard of a dwelling. A savage dog dashes forward. Just as the dog couches near for his spring, the negro, by a very quick movement, takes off his hat and extends it to the dog. The latter turns his eyes away from the negro, looks at the old, soiled wool hat, smells it, and then retires, nonplussed.

As a general rule a negro was safe from the bite of dogs. Running away was not frequent. The almost insuperable difficulty of final escape from the dogs prevented it. And it was in practice a most mild means of prevention.

I suppose that I knew and heard of the catching of some twenty odd slaves in the contiguous parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene counties, which const.i.tuted the locality with which I was familiar, and in not a single case was one injured by the bloodhounds. The dogs that are now turned loose after our convicts are of far more savage temper than were the negro dogs of the old south; and consequently the human game, when come up with, is more prompt to go up a tree than was the old slave.

There was much less lack of food and raiment among the slaves than among the cla.s.s known as the white trash. It was considered a business blunder not to keep them supplied always with more food than they wanted. They were in better physical condition than the average white laborer now shows.

And they were not worked hard. Even in the longest days of the year, when the battle with the gra.s.s was fiercest, at night the quarters were resonant with mirth, song, and dancing as soon as the mules had been watered, stabled, and fed.

The foregoing is a report, from my observation on the spot, of "all the tragic evils of slavery" to the negro in the south. I have been at pains to make it as true as can be. I purpose to follow it now with a like report of all the gladsome blessings to him of his freedom.

His true and fast friends, the abolitionists, equalized him _per saltum_ to his master as a voter and office-holder. This single measure was sure to make deadly enemies of white and black in the south, and to bring a war of races in which the superior one was bound to conquer and become absolute. This war did come, and was fought out. Profound peace has reigned for some years, and the negroes now contentedly stay away from the polls, and manifest no aspiration whatever for office and place.

His same friends gave the ex-slave equality with his old master under the criminal law. He had this in slavery only when charged with a capital offence; and if he was charged with a graver one of the non-capital offences, such as breaking and entering a dwelling, stealing something of considerable value, he was brought before a statutory court of justices of the peace, and if upon his summary trial he was convicted, his punishment was usually a short term in jail, the sheriff to give him so many lashes each day until he had received the full number adjudged in his sentence. I never heard of one that was seriously injured by this kind of punishment.

It never gave him any permanent mental anguish. His conscience approved whipping as the most fit punishment for every offence. The crimes of negroes mentioned above in this paragraph were very infrequent. Their many peccadillos were in practice wholly ignored by the law, and given over to private and domestic jurisdiction. Cuffee would sometimes indulge a sudden craving for fresh meat by appropriating a shoat or grown lamb, or he would gratify a watering mouth by stealthy invasion of melon patches or sweet potato patches and banks. And he was p.r.o.ne to other small larcenies. If caught,--which was very far from always happening,--he was whipped; and that was the last of it. Now he must replace the bounty of his master which sheltered, clothed, and fed him comfortably all his life by living from hand to mouth. His forecast utterly undeveloped, and more and more losing the work habit, there is often but one way for him to avoid starving or freezing, and that is to get the necessaries of life by various acts which are crimes in the law. It is but a scanty supply that he thus manages to get. His year is nearly always, from beginning to end, but an alternation of short feasts upon the cheapest fare, and prolonged fasts. Yet in the eye of the stern and severe law how many gross offences does he commit by doing only the things which, if he did not do, he could not keep soul and body together. And so he is brought before every court of any criminal jurisdiction, and when convicted, as he generally is, for he is nearly always guilty,--not in conscience, but guilty under the law which his emanc.i.p.ators have put him under,--often he cannot find a friend to pay his fine, and he must work it out in the chain-gang. The city has its chain-gang, the county has its chain-gang, and the State works or farms out its convicts. The percentage of whites among these convicts is very small. Often when you encounter a gang at work you cannot find a single white person in it. These negro convicts are many, many. As fast as one's time expires his place is filled by another. Disease, decay of energy from irregular food supply, growing habits of idleness, and other things in the train, bring forth tramps more plentifully, and from these the chain-gangs are more and more largely recruited. These slaves of punishment work under the eyes of guards furnished with the best of small-arms loaded to kill. The most of them work in shackles. If they do not work as their superintendents think they ought, they are strapped. I have seen them working in the rain, as I never saw required of slaves. At night they are put to sleep in a crowded log-pen, all of them chained together, the chain being made fast to each bunk. The guards are practised marksmen, known to be men who will promptly and resolutely "do their duty." This h.e.l.l-like life constantly keeps each convict watching for opportunity to make a dash for liberty. If the guards have anything like fair shots when he starts, one more unmarked and soon forgotten grave is dug and filled in the paupers' burial ground, and that is the earthly end of this poor derelict of the human race. Suppose he gets safely away from the guard. In a few minutes the unleashed dogs are yelping on his track.

In the old days even the negro dogs were fed and tended by slaves, and almost every dog in the land seemed to love negroes. But these bloodhounds in the convict camps have been bred into a deadly hatred of every negro.

Escaping Cuffee is usually caught. Then more of the paddle, heavier shackles, chains at night stronger and more taut, and the bosses harder to satisfy as he works under greater hindrances--these make his lot more h.e.l.l-like than it was before.

It is a melancholy proof of the insufficient dietary and bad hygiene of the common negroes that these convicts fatten in spite of their cruel hardships.

The long-term convicts, farmed out to coal and other mine owners and various manufacturers, and private employers, I know but little of from observation. But what I hear makes me believe that their condition is worse than that of those just described. This is to be expected, for two reasons. First, they are worked for profit by persons whose only interest is to get the largest possible product out of their labor. The labor exacted by the owner, bear in mind, would not be severe enough either to impair the market value or check vigorous reproduction of his slaves.

Second, the places where these convicts are worked are more or less retired, and thus the employer escapes scrutiny nearly all the year. Think of a negro who, receiving a twenty years' sentence for burglariously stealing a ham when he was hungry, is put to work in the coal mine! Who ever hears of him afterwards? He is soon forgotten by his wife, who takes another husband, and by his children either skulking here and there to shun the officer, or toiling in a chain-gang. Here is indeed a bitter slavery--bitterer by far than any West Africa ever knew. There the slave does not labor underground and out of the sun so dear to him. His manumission comes mercifully in many ways, long before the expiration of twenty years--the sacrifice may need a victim; he may starve; he may fall sick and be cast out in the bush. But the mine slave--the mine boss will not whip him hard enough to give him even short rest from his work, work, work; he shall always have enough of raiment, food, and sleep to keep him able to work, work, work; when he gets very sick the mine doctor will patch him up and send him back to his work, work, work; he will work, work, work out his twenty years in this h.e.l.l hole. Miss Landon in her immortal invective against child labor exclaims:

"Good G.o.d! to think upon a child That has no childish days, No careless play, no frolics wild, No words of prayer and praise!"

This factory child that never knew any of the proper joys of a child is without either sweet memory or unavailing wish. But the mine slave, the most of whose former life was pa.s.sed in the open air, how he pines for the splendor of his loved sun by day; how in his bunk he recalls his rounds by night when the Seven Stars, the Ell and Yard and Job's Coffin were his clock and the North Star his compa.s.s. Each part of the revolving year whispers to him when he is at work or dreaming. Christmas suggests the jug with the corn-cob stopper, the 'possum cooked brown, the yams exuding their sugary juice, the banjo picker and his song, the fiddle playing a dancing tune, and the floor shaking under the thumping footfalls; the cold weather following suggests the 'possum and 'c.o.o.n hunt; the early spring brings what he used to call the corn-planting birds and their lively calls; and on and on his thoughts go over mocking-bird, woodp.e.c.k.e.r, early peaches and apples, full orchards spared by frost, the watermelon, solitary and incomparable among all things for a negro to eat, his Sunday fishings and rabbit hunts, his church and society meetings, this and that dusky love who fooled him into believing that he was dearer to her than husband or any other man, especially some yellow girl, his nonesuch, exceeding all other women as the watermelon excels all other produce of tree or vine,--on and on his thoughts go over what he can never have again. I need not say a word for the white victims of child labor, for their race is rousing for their rescue, and I know its power to achieve.

But I do feel that it is my duty to put that friendless, forgotten, long-term negro convict in the minds of my southern readers. If he must be a convict, do not farm him out to mine operators or where he will be worked behind any screen. Put all our convicts, both felony and misdemeanor, upon the public roads until they need only a little working now and then, say I. There the convicts will not be worked for profit, nor in secret.

The total of the negroes suffering in southern slavery from all causes falls in amount far below that alone which has come upon him because he was stupidly subjected to the white man's criminal law, and not given reformatories and other belongings of the system which we are perfecting for juvenile offenders. The suffering in slavery was occasional only, and soon over. The present suffering of the negroes under the criminal law is constant, and is to be found rife in every locality. The aggregate of the felony and misdemeanor convicts of Georgia now at hard labor is about 4,500. The convicts sentenced by city and town police courts for short terms of days I cannot give with any approximate accuracy. I think it probable that the number of those convicted each year in the munic.i.p.al courts is somewhat larger than that of those convicted in the State courts. By reason of a late wholesale reduction of felonies the number of long-term convicts does not increase,--it is at a standstill,--but the number of the misdemeanor and munic.i.p.al convicts steadily increases. More than nine-tenths of those in each one of the three cla.s.ses are negroes.

The stench, filth, and discomfort of their nights and the hardship of their days, who can describe? How it moves my pity to see, as I often do, the convict toiling incessantly for long hours, impeded and tortured by his iron shackles, the paddle at hand, and a double-barrel or Winchester frowning over him, each to be used on occasion by somebody who cares nothing for and has no interest in him. Weary as the worker may be, a word from the boss gives new impetus to his pick or shovel. Here is the only place I have ever known on American soil where one can find "poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa." How different it was with the slave offender!

It mattered not what was the charge against him, he had persons related to him both in interest and affection who would intercede powerfully at his call. Wherever he might be,--in the sheriff's hands, or locked up by the overseer in the gin-house,--a messenger-service as secret and more sure than wireless telegraphy even if not as quick, was at his command; and some child, white or colored, or favorite servant would carry his entreaties to the Big House. And the justices, or ole master or the overseer, would be influenced by a word from ole miss, or the tears of young miss, or the importunity of young master. In the end Cuffee's punishment would be made tolerable; and after it was over he would the next night at the cabin brag joyfully of the many friends he had and what great things they had done for him--the children of his master present and showing more gladness than himself.

Which of the two was the more humane and christian punitive system for the negro? Which of the two was the better for him? That of slavery, or that produced by the conditions which his professed friends put in place of slavery?

I a.s.sert it most solemnly that I never saw a negro slave worked in shackles and under a loaded firearm, neither by his master nor an overseer, nor by their command, nor by an officer of the law; and, further, that I never had information or report that such had been done.

When their emanc.i.p.ators led the negroes out of their cabins into their new life it was something like throwing our domestic animals into the forest and desert, where they, without formed habits of self-maintenance and without knowledge of the new environment, must live, if they can live, only in compet.i.tion with their wild brothers and sisters knowing the environment and who are self-maintaining experts therein. That comparison serves somewhat. But this comes nearer: Suppose children between the ages of eight and twelve, who have never been taught to do anything for themselves, to be taken away from their parents, and settled among a people lately made bitterly hostile to the children, as the whites were made to the negroes by the effort of the emanc.i.p.ators to give political equality--nay, supremacy--to the latter. Those emanc.i.p.ated children must subsist themselves. How little they could earn by begging or work. They would have to steal to live. Those that did not steal, and for whom no companion would steal, would perish. The philanthropists who founded this infantile colony would have outdone but by a very little those who thrust the reluctant negroes into freedom.

I ask my reader to add here mentally the full description which in my last two chapters I have given of the lower cla.s.s of the negroes in the south--this description showing them to be ninety-five per cent of the whole, far below their average condition in American slavery, and steadily becoming worse.

I believe that in due time the people of the north will make these admissions:

1. Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental, and not a necessary incident of the system, just as the occasional evils of marriage to the parties are not necessarily incidental to that inst.i.tution.

2. As this slavery had improved and was still improving the negroes so prodigiously in every particular, and as their condition during the forty years following emanc.i.p.ation has been going uninterruptedly from bad to worse, until now the extinction of the great body is frightfully probable, as I shall show in my last two chapters, the sudden and sweeping abolition of 1865 was an unutterable misfortune to these dependent creatures.

Emanc.i.p.ation ought to have been gradual. Especially ought there to have been established something like the Roman patronate, under which the freedman would have been sure of wise advice, beneficial overlooking, and efficient protection from his former master.

3. The grant at once of right to vote and hold place and office to the southern negroes indiscriminately exceeds all blunders of democracy in madness and stupidity.

4. Southern slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave. The federal const.i.tution was simply obeying the commands of good conscience in recognizing the slave as the property of his owner, and protecting that property. Therefore, when the federal government emanc.i.p.ated the slaves it ought to have given the masters just compensation.

So much for what American slavery was to the negro, and what its abolition has done for him in the south. This can be told now. But for years the powers watching over our union kept the subject in the dark. It did not suit their purpose that the people of the union-preserving section should see and understand. They had decreed that northern resistance to slavery, as the solitary root of disunion, should go beyond refusing it extension into the Territories. They chose to add another provocation of the secession which they had planned as the means of abolishing slavery. This new provocation was that the north be induced to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter. To drive the south into early secession, perhaps it would not be enough merely to deny her new territory. But unite the north against the law mentioned, and encourage both running away and the underground railroad by an active public opinion, then soon all along the southern border slavery will lose its hold, some of the slaves escaping and the rest going south. This zone will, after a while, be settled by the friends and employers of free labor, who from year to year will push the southern non-slave district further in. The menace of this hostile occupation will steadily become greater to the slaveholders, and finally it will convince them that they cannot protect slavery in the union.

Many northerners who declared it was wrong to interfere with slavery in the States, at the same time sympathized with the public opposition to restoring the fugitive to his master. It is clear that they did not regard this opposition to be what it really was; that is, actual war upon slavery where it existed. To oppose execution of the law was both to invite and help runaways. And if such invitation and help was persisted in, from one end of Mason and Dixon's line to the other, the risk of escape of slaves and their consequent depreciation in market value would both steadily increase. The refusal to enforce the fugitive slave law was therefore a deadly attack upon slavery in the States; and this was so plain that the union-loving people of Georgia declared in the famous Georgia Platform of 1850 that the union could not be preserved if that law was not faithfully executed.

The faithful guardians of the American union had "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

written of purpose to prevent the execution of the fugitive slave law.

They hypnotized the root-and-branch abolitionists and Mrs. Stowe into believing that to abet in any way the restoration of a flying slave was an unpardonable crime; and that the obligation of conscience to refrain from committing such a crime imperatively commanded disregard of all counter provisions of the const.i.tution and the law of the land. One cannot at all understand the mighty abolition movement if he stop with the professed motives of Phillips, Whittier, Garrison, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest. They believed in their hearts, and declared, its purpose was to wipe out the great national disgrace of slavery, to lift the slave out of an abyss of unspeakable outrage and injustice, and to better his condition. As we have shown you, they were, in their very extreme of conscientiousness, as wide from the facts and right as wide can be. They were not doing their own wills, as they thought they were. They but did the will of the fates. The latter ruthlessly--so it seems to us now--sacrificed both the prosperity and comfort of the southern people for several generations, and the very existence, it may be, of nearly all the negroes in America, besides also making a laughing-stock of the abolitionists--all to the end to kill that nationalization which threatened the integrity of the American union.

I believe that I can now take my reader on with me in what I have to say of Mrs. Stowe's book. Let him bear in mind that the object of the fates was to have in it not a representation true to fact, but such an untrue and probable one as would unite the people of the north in moral and conscientious resolve against any and every attempt to restore a fugitive slave. What the fates wanted was an author who appeared to have extensive and accurate acquaintance with slavery, and who, while believing it most conscientiously to be the extreme of evil to the black, was endowed with the power to make the north see with _her_ eyes. They found their author in Mrs. Stowe, whom they had educated and trained from infancy.

In view of the mighty influence which "Uncle Tom's Cabin" exercised upon public opinion, it is important to examine what were Mrs. Stowe's qualifications to speak as an authority on southern slavery. And in this investigation the same qualifications of all others who arraigned the system for what they alleged were its heinous moral wrongs to the slave are likewise involved. The statement of Professor Wendell, quoted above, that she was the only one of the abolitionists who had observed slavery "on the spot," can be corroborated by overwhelming proofs. If it be made to appear, as I think will be the case, that she was from first to last under a delusion which metamorphosed the negro into a Caucasian, and further that she had no real opportunities of learning the facts of slavery, then the case of the root-and-branch abolitionists must fall with the testimony of the only eye-witness whom they have called.

Whether she was biased or not we will let her own words decide. Here they are:

"I was a child in 1820 [she was then nine years old] when the Missouri question was agitated; and one of the strongest and deepest impressions on my mind was that made by my father's sermons and prayers, and the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time.

I remember his preaching drawing tears down the hardest faces of the old farmers in his congregation. I well remember his prayers morning and evening in the family for 'poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa,' that the time of her deliverance might come; prayers offered with strong crying and tears, and which indelibly impressed my heart, and made me what I am from my very soul, the enemy of all slavery. Every brother that I have has been in his sphere a leading anti-slavery man. As for myself and husband, we have for the last seventeen years lived on the border of a slave State, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped them with all we had to give. I have received the children of liberated slaves into a family school, and taught them with my own children, and it has been the influence that we found in the church and by the altar that has made us do all this."[90]

No comment is needed. The pa.s.sage shows that her strongly excited feelings unavoidably shaped all her perceptions and formed all her judgments as to everything in slavery.

Now as to the means she had of acquiring the facts. Although she had seen a little of Kentucky, a border slave State, she had never lived in it, nor anywhere else in the south. Especially is it to be emphasized that she had had no experience of the cotton region, the real seat of slavery, and the only place where it could be fully studied and learned. She pa.s.sed some eighteen years in lower Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky, where she saw much of escaping slaves. Of course, being aflame with zeal as she was for her subject, she had observed closely the native negroes of the north. Such of these as she met were widely different from the ma.s.s in slavery; for, born and bred in the north, they had had the beneficent training of the free-labor system, and also opportunity to absorb considerable of a higher culture. These negroes were exceptional, even of the northern natives. And the fugitives were also exceptional; for they far excelled the companions left behind them in intelligence, spirit, and every essential of good character. An ordinary Cuffee had liberty the least of all things in his thoughts. A negro like Hector or Garrison, the former escaping from Calhoun and the other from Toombs, was as much above the average as the shepherd dog is above common sheep-worriers and egg-suckers. Mrs. Stowe, as her book shows, had no conception whatever of the ordinary plantation negro. And while she had seen much of some Kentuckians, these were not representative southerners. They lived upon the border, where slave labor found but little lucrative opportunity, and they were also affected more or less with the sentiments of their nearby northern neighbors. Naturally only those Kentuckians of the border who really were of her opinion would consort with this decided anti-slavery partisan; the others would stand aloof. Mrs. Stowe never knew either real negroes or real slaveholders. And she also knew nothing whatever of cotton plantation management. Some authors show an amazingly full and accurate knowledge of countries and communities which they never saw. Burke's knowledge of every detail touching India occurs to me. Lieber had visited Greece while Niebuhr had not. When the former had minutely described to the other some famous landscape,--say the battlefield of Marathon,--Niebuhr would make copious inquiries about remains of old roads and belongings which the other had forgotten, although he had seen them.

Tom Moore had never been in Persia, but there is so much of that country drawn to the life in Lalla Rookh that somebody applied to him the saying that reading D'Herbelot was as good as riding on the back of a camel. Mrs.

Stowe could not collect, sift, and read facts, and see through the most cunningly devised masks, as Henry D. Lloyd showed his marvellous power to do in "Wealth against Commonwealth." That was not her gift. Her gift was to tell the best of stories--to vary it prodigally and artistically throughout with wonders, with things to make you shudder and also thrill with pleasure, with things to make you cry and laugh. Her emotional invention was the great factor. Here is her own account:

"The first part of the book ever committed to writing was the death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame.

She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away she read it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, 'Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!'"

The description of Uncle Tom's death is the goal and climax of the novel.

Its scene is laid far down in the south, hundreds of miles below any place which she or the children had ever seen or studied. It would have been more in order for her to submit the draft to observant residents of that locality; but the fates did not intend that her convictions should be weakened by real information. Evidently she considered that her truth to fact was fully vindicated by the effect of the narrative upon her children, who, like herself, were entirely without knowledge of the subject. They wept and exclaimed over it. Why, of course, like all children they loved horrible tales, which their weeping and lamentation proved that they thought were true. Doubtless these same children had made respectable demonstrations over Bluebeard or Little Red Ridinghood. And now over Uncle Tom's death, which is more dreadful than anything in Dante's Inferno, and as pure figment, their feelings were shaken with storm and tempest as never before.

The statement just quoted proceeds thus:

"From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed upon her with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied.

The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial."

I often fancy, as I think over it, that the last quotation describes suggestions from the fates.

But we must let Mrs. Stowe finish what we have had her tell in part.

Informing us that, after writing "two or three first chapters," she made an arrangement for weekly serial publication in the _National Era_, she says:

"She was then in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with a party of pupils in her family to whom she was imparting daily lessons with her own children, and with untrained servants requiring constant supervision, but the story was so much more intense a reality to her than any other earthly thing that the weekly instalment never failed. It was there in her mind day and night waiting to be written, and requiring but a few moments to bring it into veritable characters. _The weekly number was always read to the family circle before it was sent away, and all the household kept up an intense interest in the progress of the story._"[91]