Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

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Of course, they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it
would have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates
higher virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery have not depraved him, it has done him little
harm. If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like
Uncle Tom, let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is
Cassy and Dred who are the normal protest of human nature against
systems which degrade it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons,
who had seen their brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated,
hanged on iron hooks, broken on the wheel, and had been all the while
solemnly assured that this was paternal government, could only repay
the paternalism in the same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman
saw a negro chained to a red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient
slaves, in repeated instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and
sent to boat-service for the rest of their lives; and of course the
rebels borrowed these suggestions. They could bear to watch their
captives expire under the lash, for they had previously watched their
parents. If the government rangers received twenty-five florins for
every rebel right-hand which they brought in, of course they risked
their own right-hands in the pursuit. The difference was, that the one
brutality was that of a mighty state, and the other was only the
retaliation of the victims. And after all, Stedman never ventures to
assert that the imitation equalled the original, or that the Maroons
had inflicted nearly so much as they had suffered.

The leaders of the rebels, especially, were men who had each his own
story of wrongs to tell. Baron, the most formidable, had been the slave
of a Swedish gentleman, who had taught him to read and write, taken him
to Europe, promised to manumit him on his return,--and then, breaking
his word, sold him to a Jew. Baron refused to work for his new master,
was publicly flogged under the gallows, fled to the woods next day, and
became the terror of the colony. Joli Coeur, his first captain, was
avenging the cruel wrongs of his mother. Bonny, another leader, was
born in the woods, his mother having taken refuge there just
previously, to escape from his father, who was also his master. Cojo,
another, had defended his master against the insurgents until he was
obliged by ill usage to take refuge among them; and he still bore upon
his wrist, when Stedman saw him, a silver band, with the inscription,--
"True to the Europeans." In dealing with wrongs like these, Mr. Carlyle
would have found the despised negroes quite as ready as himself to take
the total-abstinence pledge against rose-water.

In his first two months' campaign, Stedman never saw the trace of a
Maroon; in the second, he once came upon their trail; in the third, one
captive was brought in, two surrendered themselves voluntarily, and a
large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the
camp, ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion.
Deep swamps and scorching sands,--toiling through briers all day, and
sleeping at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with
weapons supported on sticks crossed beneath,--all this was endured for
two years and a half, before Stedman personally came in sight of the
enemy.

On August 20th, 1775, the troops found themselves at last in the midst
of the rebel settlements. These villages and forts bore a variety of
expressive names, such as "Hide me, O thou surrounding verdure," "I
shall be taken," "The woods lament for me," "Disturb me, if you dare,"
"Take a tasting, if you like it," "Come, try me, if you be men," "God
knows me and none else," "I shall moulder before I shall be taken."
Some were only plantation-grounds with a few huts, and were easily laid
waste; but all were protected more or less by their mere situations.
Quagmires surrounded them, covered by a thin crust of verdure,
sometimes broken through by one man's weight, when the victim sank
hopelessly into the black and bottomless depths below. In other
directions there was a solid bottom, but inconveniently covered by
three or four feet of water, through which the troops waded
breast-deep, holding their muskets high in the air, unable to reload
them when once discharged, and liable to be picked off by rebel scouts,
who ingeniously posted themselves in the tops of palm-trees.

Through this delectable region Colonel Fougeaud and his followers
slowly advanced, drawing near the fatal shore where Captain Meyland's
detachment had just been defeated, and where their mangled remains
still polluted the beach. Passing this point of danger without attack,
they suddenly met a small party of rebels, each bearing on his back a
beautifully-woven hamper of snow-white rice: these loads they threw
down, and disappeared. Next appeared an armed body from the same
direction, who fired upon them once and swiftly retreated; and in a few
moments the soldiers came upon a large field of standing rice, beyond
which lay, like an amphitheatre, the rebel village. But between the
village and the field had been piled successive defences of logs and
branches, behind which simple redoubts the Maroons lay concealed. A
fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during which nearly every soldier
and ranger was wounded, but, to their great amazement, not one was
killed. This was an enigma to them until after the skirmish, when the
surgeon found that most of them had been struck, not by bullets, but by
various substitutes, such as pebbles, coat-buttons, and bits of silver
coin, which had penetrated only skin-deep. "We also observed that
several of the poor rebel negroes, who had been shot, had only the
shards of Spa-water cans, instead of flints, which could seldom do
execution; and it was certainly owing to these circumstances that we
came off so well."

The rebels at length retreated, first setting fire to their village; a
hundred or more lightly built houses, some of them two stories high,
were soon in flames; and as this conflagration occupied the only neck
of land between two impassable morasses, the troops were unable to
follow, and the Maroons had left nothing but rice-fields to be
pillaged. That night the military force was encamped in the woods;
their ammunition was almost gone; so they were ordered to lie flat on
the ground, even in case of attack; they could not so much as build a
fire. Before midnight an attack was made on them, partly with bullets
and partly with words; the Maroons were all around them in the forest,
but their object was a puzzle: they spent most of the night in bandying
compliments with the black rangers, whom they alternately denounced,
ridiculed, and challenged to single combat. At last Fougeaud and
Stedman joined in the conversation, and endeavored to make this
midnight volley of talk the occasion for a treaty. This was received
with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed through the woods like a
concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_ of horns and
hallooing. The Colonel, persisting, offered them "life, liberty,
victuals, drink, and all they wanted"; in return, they ridiculed him
unmercifully: he was a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from
his own country, and would soon run away from theirs; they profoundly
pitied him and his soldiers; they would scorn to spend powder on such
scarecrows; they would rather feed and clothe them, as being poor white
slaves, hired to be shot at and starved for four-pence a day. But as
for the planters, overseers, and rangers, they should die, every one of
them, and Bonny should be governor of the colony. "After this, they
tinkled their bill-hooks, fired a volley, and gave three cheers; which
being answered by the rangers, the clamor ended, and the rebels
dispersed with the rising sun."

Very aimless nonsense it certainly appeared. But the next day put a new
aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise,
the Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and
children, in preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice,
yams, and cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for
subsistence during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the
hungry soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of
generalship in a savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would
have done honor to any European commander."

From this time the Maroons fulfilled their threats. Shooting down
without mercy every black ranger who came within their reach,--one of
these rangers being, in Stedman's estimate, worth six white
soldiers,--they left Colonel Fougeaud and his regulars to die of
starvation and fatigue. The enraged Colonel, "finding himself thus
foiled by a naked negro, swore he would pursue Bonny to the world's
end." But he never got any nearer than to Bonny's kitchen-gardens. He
put the troops on half-allowance, sent back for provisions and
ammunition,--and within ten days changed his mind, and retreated to the
settlements in despair. Soon after, this very body of rebels, under
Bonny's leadership, plundered two plantations in the vicinity, and
nearly captured a powder-magazine, which was, however, successfully
defended by some armed slaves.

For a year longer these expeditions continued. The troops never gained
a victory, and they lost twenty men for every rebel killed; but they
gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and
planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the
deeper recesses of the woods or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.
They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier
guard-houses. They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and
bred in the woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white
man and of a cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with
torture, stretched forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian
eloquence,--"These hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he
still went bare-footed, still quarrelled with his colonel, still
sketched the scenery and described the reptiles, still reared gree-gree
worms for his private kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote
execrable, still pitied all the sufferers around him, black, white, and
red, until finally he and his comrades were ordered back to Holland in
1776.

Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was
probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they
sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious
collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs
of old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had
left behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his
eccentric narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for
his beautiful quadroon wife and his only son.

Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign
first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate
friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then
her piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had
just gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not
legally emancipate his own children from slavery. Soon after, Stedman
was dangerously ill, was neglected and alone; fruits and cordials were
anonymously sent to him, which proved at last to have come from Joanna,
and she came herself, ere long, and nursed him, grateful for the
visible sympathy he had shown to her. This completed the conquest; the
passionate young Englishman, once recovered, loaded her with presents,
which she refused,--talked of purchasing her and educating her in
Europe, which she also declined, as burdening him too greatly,--and
finally, amid the ridicule of all good society in Paramaribo,
surmounted all legal obstacles and was united to the beautiful girl in
honorable marriage. He provided a cottage for her, where he spent his
furloughs, in perfect happiness, for four years.

The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or
disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for
the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally
a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her
uncle, was a captain among the rebels against whom her husband fought.
And up to the time when Stedman was ordered back to Holland, he was
unable to purchase her freedom, nor could he, until the very last
moment, procure the emancipation of his boy. His perfect delight at
this last triumph, when obtained, elicited some satire from his white
friends. "While the well-thinking few highly applauded my sensibility,
many not only blamed, but publicly derided me for my paternal
affection, which was called a weakness, a whim." "Nearly forty
beautiful boys and girls were left to perpetual slavery by their
parents of my acquaintance, and many of them without being so much as
once inquired after at all."

But Stedman was a true-hearted fellow, if his sentiment did sometimes
run to rodomontade; he left his Joanna only in the hope that a year or
two in Europe would repair his ruined fortunes, and he could return to
treat himself to the purchase of his own wedded wife. He describes,
with unaffected pathos, their parting scene,--though, indeed, there
were several successive partings,--and closes the description in a
manner worthy of that remarkable combination of enthusiasms which
characterized him. "My melancholy having surpassed all description, I
at last determined to weather one or two painful years in her absence;
and in the afternoon went to dissipate my mind at a Mr. Roux' cabinet
of Indian curiosities; where as my eye chanced to fall on a
rattlesnake, I will, before I leave the colony, describe this dangerous
reptile."

It was impossible to write the history of the Maroons of Surinam except
through the biography of our Ensign, (at last promoted Captain,)
because nearly all we know of them is through his quaint and
picturesque narrative, with its profuse illustrations by his own hand.
It is not fair, therefore, to end without chronicling his safe arrival
in Holland, on June 3d, 1777. It is a remarkable fact, that, after his
life in the woods, even the Dutch looked slovenly to his eyes. "The
inhabitants, who crowded about us, appeared but a disgusting assemblage
of ill-formed and ill-dressed rabble,--so much had my prejudices been
changed by living among Indians and blacks: their eyes seemed to
resemble those of a pig; their complexions were like the color of foul
linen; they seemed to have no teeth, and to be covered over with rags
and dirt. This prejudice, however, was not against these people only,
but against all Europeans in general, when compared to the sparkling
eyes, ivory teeth, shining skin, and remarkable cleanliness of those I
had left behind me." Yet, in spite of these superior attractions, he
never recrossed the Atlantic; for his Joanna died soon after, and his
promising son, being sent to the father, was educated in England,
became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at sea. With his elegy,
in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded by a mourning
parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect they had on
the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative of a Five
Years' Expedition" closes.

The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year,
was ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The
Maroons gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested
themselves, left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three
thousand,--in Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at
seventy thousand by Captain Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831,--and a
recent American scientific expedition, having visited them in their
homes, reported them as still enjoying their wild freedom, and
multiplying, while the Indians on the same soil decay. The beautiful
forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty,
and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a
hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure;
the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle;
the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for
the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their
fill; the trees are garlanded with epiphytes and convolvuli, and
anchored to the earth by a thousand vines. High among their branches,
the red and yellow mockingbirds still build their hanging nests,
uncouth storks and tree-porcupines cling above, and the spotted deer
and the tapir drink from the sluggish stream below. The night is still
made noisy with a thousand cries of bird and beast; and the stillness
of the sultry noon is broken by the slow tolling of the _campanero_, or
bell-bird, far in the deep, dark woods, like the chime of some lost
convent. And as Nature is unchanged there, so apparently is man; the
Maroons still retain their savage freedom, still shoot their wild game
and trap their fish, still raise their rice and cassava, yams and
plantains,--still make cups from the gourd-tree and hammocks from the
silk-grass plant, wine from the palm-tree's sap, brooms from its
leaves, fishing-lines from its fibres, and salt from its ashes. Their
life does not yield, indeed, the very highest results of spiritual
culture; its mental and moral results may not come up to the level of
civilization, but they rise far above the level of slavery. In the
changes of time, the Maroons may yet elevate themselves into the one,
but they will never relapse into the other.

CIRCUMSTANCE.

She had remained, during all that day, with a sick neighbor,--those
eastern wilds of Maine in that epoch frequently making neighbors and
miles synonymous,--and so busy had she been with care and sympathy that
she did not at first observe the approaching night. But finally the
level rays, reddening the snow, threw their gleam upon the wall, and,
hastily donning cloak and hood, she bade her friends farewell and
sallied forth on her return. Home lay some three miles distant, across
a copse, a meadow, and a piece of woods,--the woods being a fringe on
the skirts of the great forests that stretch far away into the North.
That home was one of a dozen log-houses lying a few furlongs apart from
each other, with their half-cleared demesnes separating them at the
rear from a wilderness untrodden save by stealthy native or deadly
panther tribes.

She was in a nowise exalted frame of spirit,--on the contrary, rather
depressed by the pain she had witnessed and the fatigue she had
endured; but in certain temperaments such a condition throws open the
mental pores, so to speak, and renders one receptive of every
influence. Through the little copse she walked slowly, with her cloak
folded about her, lingering to imbibe the sense of shelter, the sunset
filtered in purple through the mist of woven spray and twig, the
companionship of growth not sufficiently dense to band against her the
sweet home-feeling of a young and tender wintry wood. It was therefore
just on the edge of the evening that she emerged from the place and
began to cross the meadow-land. At one hand lay the forest to which her
path wound; at the other the evening star hung over a tide of failing
orange that slowly slipped down the earth's broad side to sadden other
hemispheres with sweet regret. Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes
wide-open, she distinctly saw in the air before her what was not there
a moment ago, a winding-sheet,--cold, white, and ghastly, waved by the
likeness of four wan hands,--that rose with a long inflation and fell
in rigid folds, while a voice, shaping itself from the hollowness
above, spectral and melancholy, sighed,--"The Lord have mercy on the
people! The Lord have mercy on the people!" Three times the sheet with
its corpse-covering outline waved beneath the pale hands, and the
voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed, "The Lord have
mercy on the people!" Then all was gone, the place was clear again, the
gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot; she looked about her, shook
her shoulders decidedly, and, pulling on her hood, went forward once
more.

She might have been a little frightened by such an apparition, if she
had led a life of less reality than frontier settlers are apt to lead;
but dealing with hard fact does not engender a flimsy habit of mind,
and this woman was too sincere and earnest in her character, and too
happy in her situation, to be thrown by antagonism merely upon
superstitious fancies and chimeras of the second-sight. She did not
even believe herself subject to an hallucination, but smiled simply, a
little vexed that her thought could have framed such a glamour from the
day's occurrences, and not sorry to lift the bough of the warder of the
woods and enter and disappear in their sombre path. If she had been
imaginative, she would have hesitated at her first step into a region
whose dangers were not visionary; but I suppose that the thought of a
little child at home would conquer that propensity in the most
habituated. So, biting a bit of spicy birch, she went along. Now and
then she came to a gap where the trees had been partially felled, and
here she found that the lingering twilight was explained by that
peculiar and perhaps electric film which sometimes sheathes the sky in
diffused light for very many hours before a brilliant aurora. Suddenly,
a swift shadow, like the fabulous flying-dragon, writhed through the
air before her, and she felt herself instantly seized and borne aloft.
It was that wild beast--the most savage and serpentine and subtle and
fearless of our latitudes--known by hunters as the Indian Devil, and he
held her in his clutches on the broad floor of a swinging fir-bough.
His long sharp claws were caught in her clothing, he worried them
sagaciously a little, then, finding that ineffectual to free them, he
commenced licking her bare white arm with his rasping tongue and
pouring over her the wide streams of his hot, fetid breath. So quick
had this flashing action been that the woman had had no time for alarm;
moreover, she was not of the screaming kind; but now, as she felt him
endeavoring to disentangle his claws, and the horrid sense of her fate
smote her, and she saw instinctively the fierce plunge of those
weapons, the long strips of living flesh torn from her bones, the
agony, the quivering disgust, itself a worse agony,--while by her side,
and holding her in his great lithe embrace, the monster crouched, his
white tusks whetting and gnashing, his eyes glaring through all the
darkness like balls of red fire,--a shriek, that rang in every forest
hollow, that startled every winter-housed thing, that stirred and woke
the least needle of the tasselled pines, tore through her lips. A
moment afterward, the beast left the arm, once white, now crimson, and
looked up alertly.

She did not think at this instant to call upon God. She called upon her
husband. It seemed to her that she had but one friend in the world;
that was he; and again the cry, loud, clear, prolonged, echoed through
the woods. It was not the shriek that disturbed the creature at his
relish; he was not born in the woods to be scared of an owl, you know;
what then? It mast have been the echo, most musical, most resonant,
repeated and yet repeated, dying with long sighs of sweet sound,
vibrated from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of cave
and cliff. Her thought flew after it; she knew, that, even if her
husband heard it, he yet could not reach her in time; she saw that
while the beast listened he would not gnaw,--and this she _felt_
directly, when the rough, sharp, and multiplied stings of his tongue
retouched her arm. Again her lips opened by instinct, but the sound
that issued thence came by reason. She had heard that music charmed
wild beasts,--just this point between life and death intensified every
faculty,--and when she opened her lips the third time, it was not for
shrieking, but for singing.

A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous motion; it was
the cradle-song with which she rocked her baby;--how could she sing
that? And then she remembered the baby sleeping rosily on the long
settee before the fire,--the father cleaning his gun, with one foot on
the green wooden rundle,--the merry light from the chimney dancing out
and through the room, on the rafters of the ceiling with their tassels
of onions and herbs, on the log walls painted with lichens and
festooned with apples, on the king's-arm slung across the shelf with
the old pirate's-cutlass, on the snow-pile of the bed, and on the great
brass clock,--dancing, too, and lingering on the baby, with his fringed
gentian eyes, his chubby fists clenched on the pillow, and his fine
breezy hair fanning with the motion of his father's foot. All this
struck her in one, and made a sob of her breath, and she ceased.

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