The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866

It is proper that full weight should be given to the alleged justification of these enormities. A diabolical plot existed, whose meshes included the whole island, and whose purpose was to put to death every white man and to outrage every white woman. This is what the Governor asserts. This is what the Assembly reiterates. This is the charge upon which every appeal of the Jamaican journals turns. The whole truth we probably never shall know. The men who could best reveal it are silent in the graves which lawless violence has dug for them, and will bear no testimony except at the bar or Eternal Justice. The report of the Committee of Inquiry will no doubt shed some light. Pending that inquiry there are considerations which strike every one. If for two years a bloody insurrection had been plotted, and the outbreak at Morant Bay was the first stroke to toward its accomplishment, is it credible that these truculent rebels should submit themselves as sheep to the slaughter,—that not one band should be found to strike a manly blow for life and liberty? If such an insurrection had its roots in every part of the island, is it credible, that, while the whole military and naval force, and no small part of the white inhabitants, were engaged in putting down the thirty thousand of their brethren in St. Thomas and Portland parishes, the three hundred thousand blacks all over the island should remain peaceable and law-abiding? And it is to be noticed that, since the reign of terror has subsided a little, those who know the negroes best, the missionaries who labor among them, express the most hearty contempt for these charges. But suppose that the negro had plotted insurrection, diabolical, satanic, would that be any excuse for wholesale slaughter, without forms of law, when all resistance was at an end? We know that the South plotted and consummated rebellion; that her people have slain three hundred thousand of our sons on the battle-field; that more than thirty thousand have wasted and died of slow torture in her prisons; that whenever the secrets of that charnel-house, Southern life, are disclosed, they will tell of thousands of Unionists who were hung, who were shot, who were burned at the stake, who were hunted by dogs, who were scourged to death with whips, and all because they were faithful to their country. And knowing all this, is there a man of the North who, when military resistance has ceased, would march our armies southward, hang every tenth man, shoot every fourth, scourge as many more, and suffer a wild soldiery to strip half naked and score with cruel whips thousands of the women? And does it alter the moral aspect of the case, that these things are transacted on a little island of the sea, and not on a continent,—or that the skin of the sufferer is black instead of white?

The use men seek to make of events reveals often the motives which they carried into the transaction of these events. Never was this more true of any body of people than of the planters of Jamaica. The Kingston Journal, an opposition, but not radical paper, boldly asserts, that the press has been gagged because it urged upon government the necessity of reform; that it has not dared to comment upon current facts, lest it should come under grave suspicion; that "now, when the greatest order prevails, and there is not the remotest probability of another outbreak, we dare not comment upon events, which, for the good of all classes, ought to be calmly and fully discussed." A significant commentary upon these statements is the fact that Mr. Levien, the editor of a Jamaica paper, was arrested, because in an editorial he boldly condemned the trial and execution of Mr. Gordon. And it is probable that he escaped paying dearly for his courage, only because the Chief Justice of Jamaica declared the whole law under which he was arrested unconstitutional, and dismissed the case. A still more significant commentary upon these statements is that other fact, that, in the midst of what they averred were the throes of a great rebellion, the members of the Assembly proceeded to destroy the very foundations of civil and religious liberty and of the freedom of the press. They proposed to give the Governor almost despotic authority, by surrendering the franchise of the Assembly, and vesting its power in a council of twenty-four, half of whom should be appointed by the Governor himself, and half elected by the people from the list only of those who had estates worth more than fifteen hundred dollars a year, or a salary of more than twenty-five hundred dollars. All social worship, all conference and prayer meetings, and even family prayers, if more than two strangers were present, were to be interdicted, unless, indeed, they were conducted by a minister of a favored sect. The denominations who had chiefly ministered to the blacks were to be placed under such disabilities as should greatly limit, or else destroy, their usefulness. And to round out and complete the circle of despotism, this proposition, was introduced,—"that if anything is contained in any printed paper which may be considered seditious, or that may be adjudged so by any court which the Governor may appoint, the writer shall be sentenced to hard labor in the penitentiary for seven years." It is idle to suppose that these measures will be sanctioned by the Queen; but they show what feelings burn in the breasts of the planters, and admonish us to receive with caution any statements which they may make concerning other classes of the community.

This Jamaica "insurrection," whose origin, growth, and extinguishment in blood have now been traced, has been the cause of we know not how many oracular warnings from the lips of those who have not been distinguished by any hearty attachment to the rights of the black. "See now," they say, "what is the peril of emancipating these blacks." "Behold what comes of educating this people up to the capacity of mischief." "Acknowledge now that not even the gift of universal suffrage will elevate and soften a race at once fickle and ferocious. There is no safety but in keeping them under. Stop in your perilous experiments while you can."

So long as the accounts of this outbreak are at once so conflicting and so colored by party feeling, it may not be easy to say what are its positive lessons. But it is easy to tell some things which it does not teach.

In the first place, it does not teach the danger of conferring the right to vote upon the negro, for the negro of Jamaica has never attained to that privilege. His traducers cry out, "What a race! The best fed, the best clothed, the best sheltered, the least worked peasantry on the face of the earth! Free! Free to make their own laws, to choose their own rulers, to govern themselves! And yet they are discontented!" Turn now and inquire what are the facts about their governing themselves. True, no law says the negro shall not vote, but the qualification is made so high that it is impossible that he should vote. In a country where wages are scarcely a quarter of a dollar a day, he is required to have an estate worth thirty dollars a year, or an income of one hundred and forty dollars a year, or to pay taxes of fifteen dollars a year. Suppose now that in New England a law were passed that no man should vote who had not an estate worth two hundred dollars a year, or an income of one thousand dollars, or who did not pay one hundred dollars yearly tax,—and this, considering the difference of wages, is scarcely as high a qualification as that of Jamaica,—and how large a proportion of our people would obtain the privileges of a voter? In fact, in Jamaica only three thousand vote, or about one twenty-fifth of the adult males. Is it not just possible that the discontent there may grow out of aspirations for self-government, and for the dignity and privileges, as well as the name, of freemen? May not the outbreak teach the danger of not allowing the negro to vote?

In the second place, this rebellion does not teach the danger of educating the negro; for the negro of Jamaica never has been educated. While the government has wrung from his scanty wages a million dollars, it pays the Governor alone more than three times the sum it appropriates to education. It doles out for the education of seventy-five thousand children the pittance of twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Did not the negro himself eke out this bounty from his own little savings, not one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were, under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then, the real condition of affairs,—three hundred and fifty thousand blacks, a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were brought from Africa, with the wild blood of their fathers scarcely diluted in their veins, with all the old traditions of Fetichism and Obi worship fresh in their minds, altogether uneducated, or at best half educated; consider what virgin soil is here for every vile superstition, what a field for the demagogue to cultivate, and then decide whether it might not be safer, after all, to educate the negro in Jamaica.

This insurrection does not teach, in the third place, the danger of obliterating the lines of caste, for in Jamaica those lines have never been obliterated, or even made faint. It may be doubted whether there was ever a moment when the ill-dissembled contempt of the whites, and the distrust of the blacks, were more profound then now. An intelligent observer declared, in 1850, that the gap between the blacks and whites had been steadily increasing ever since emancipation. And ten years later the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society records, "that, as a general statement, there is no generous feeling in the relations between employer and employed. The negro can expect nothing but barest justice, and is happy if he gets that." Can there be any safety for the minority, when the majority, which numbers fifteen to one, has such a sense of injustice rankling in its breast? One wades through the late reprints of the Jamaica journals, column after column, page after page, filled with coarse invective, with bitter denunciation, with injurious suspicion; sees with what terrible relish the sufferings of these deluded people are recorded; marks how the heroism which goes to the scaffold without a tremor, and looks undeserved death in the face without a fear, is travestied; shudders to hear the planters, after thousands have been slain, yet cry for more blood; and then he puts the paper down and says, "Here in this language is material enough out of which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who does not see that the gulf of caste, too wide before, has widened and deepened almost unfathomably by the influence of the events of the last few months. He is mad, too, who thinks that Morant Bay, or the parish of St. Thomas in the East, with their unshrived dead, is a safer place for a white man to dwell in than it was six months ago.

It is too early to gather up all the lessons of this last of the almost innumerable outbreaks in Jamaica. They may never be gathered up. But one lesson stands out prominently, and that is, the safety of justice. We cannot bring perfect equality upon the earth. It is not desirable perhaps that we should. To the end of time, probably, there will be rich and poor, high and low, weak and strong, black and white. But we can be just. We can recognize every man as a child of God. We can grant to him all the rights, all the privileges, and all the opportunities which belong to a man. That is a lesson which Jamaica has never learned, and therefore she sits under the shadow of her mountains, by the side of the restless sea, clothed in garments of wretchedness.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866

IV

DRESS, OR WHO MAKES THE FASHIONS

The door of my study being open, I heard in the distant parlor a sort of flutter of silken wings, and chatter of bird-like voices, which told me that a covey of Jennie's pretty young street birds had just alighted there. I could not forbear a peep at the rosy faces that glanced out under pheasants' tails, doves' wings, and nodding hummingbirds, and made one or two errands in that direction only that I might gratify my eyes with a look at them.

Your nice young girl, of good family and good breeding, is always a pretty object, and, for my part, I regularly lose my heart (in a sort of figurative way) to every fresh, charming creature that trips across my path. All their mysterious rattle-traps and whirligigs,—their curls and networks and crimples and rimples and crisping-pins,—their little absurdities, if you will,—have to me a sort of charm, like the tricks and stammerings of a curly-headed child. I should have made a very poor censor if I had been put in Cato's place: the witches would have thrown all my wisdom into some private chip-basket of their own, and walked off with it in triumph. Never a girl bows to me that I do not see in her eye a twinkle of confidence that she could, if she chose, make an old fool of me. I surrender at discretion on first sight.

Jennie's friends are nice girls,—the flowers of good, staid, sensible families,—not heathen blossoms nursed in the hot-bed heat of wild, high-flying, fashionable society. They have been duly and truly taught and brought up, by good mothers and painstaking aunties, to understand in their infancy that handsome is that handsome does; that little girls must not be vain of their pretty red shoes and nice curls, and must remember that it is better to be good than to be handsome; with all other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had their minds improved in all modern ways,—have calculated eclipses, and read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,—so that a person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled at the prospect of entering into conversation with them. For all these reasons I listened quite indulgently to the animated conversation that was going on about—Well!

What do girls generally talk about, when a knot of them get together? Not, I believe, about the sources of the Nile, or the precession of the equinoxes, or the nature of the human understanding, or Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton, although they have learned all about them in school; but upon a theme much nearer and dearer,—the one all-pervading feminine topic ever since Eve started the first toilet of fig-leaves; and as I caught now and then a phrase of their chatter, I jotted it down in pure amusement, giving to each charming speaker the name of the bird under whose colors she was sailing.

"For my part," said little Humming-Bird, "I'm quite worn out with sewing; the fashions are all so different from what they were last year, that everything has to be made over."

"Isn't it dreadful!" said Pheasant. "There's my new mauve silk dress! it was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up company because I have nothing to wear."

"Who does set the fashions, I wonder," said Humming-Bird; "they seem now-a-days to whirl faster and faster, till really they don't leave one time for anything."

"Yes," said Dove, "I haven't a moment for reading, or drawing, or keeping up my music. The fact is, now-a-days, to keep one's self properly dressed is all one can do. If I were grande dame now, and had only to send an order to my milliner and dressmaker, I might be beautifully dressed all the time without giving much thought to it myself; and that is what I should like. But this constant planning about one's toilet, changing your buttons and your fringes and your bonnet-trimmings and your hats every other day, and then being behindhand! It is really too fatiguing.

"Well," said Jennie, "I never pretend to keep up. I never expect to be in the front rank of fashion, but no girl wants to be behind every one; nobody wants to have people say, 'Do see what an old-times, rubbishy-looking creature that is.' And now, with my small means and conscience, (for I have a conscience in this matter, and don't wish to spend any more time and money than is needed to keep one's self fresh and tasteful,) I find my dress quite a fatiguing care."

"Well, now, girls," said Humming-Bird, "do you really know, I have sometimes thought I should like to be a nun, just to get rid of all this labor. If I once gave up dress altogether, and knew I was to have nothing but one plain robe tied round my waist with a cord, it does seem to me as if it would be a perfect repose,—only one is a Protestant, you know."

Now, as Humming-Bird was the most notoriously dressy individual in the little circle, this suggestion was received with quite a laugh. But Dove took it up.

"Well, really," she said, "when dear Mr. S– preaches those saintly sermons to us about our baptismal vows, and the nobleness of an unworldly life, and calls on us to live for something purer and higher than we are living for, I confess that sometimes all my life seems to me a mere sham,—that I am going to church, and saying solemn words, and being wrought up by solemn music, and uttering most solemn vows and prayers, all to no purpose; and then I come away and look at my life, all resolving itself into a fritter about dress, and sewing-silk, cord, braid, and buttons,—the next fashion of bonnets,—how to make my old dresses answer instead of new,—how to keep the air of the world, while in my heart I am cherishing something higher and better. If there's anything I detest it is hypocrisy; and sometimes the life I lead looks like it. But how to get out of it? what to do?"

"I'm sure," said Humming-Bird, "that taking care of my clothes and going into company is, frankly, all I do. If I go to parties, as other girls do, and make calls, and keep dressed,—you know papa is not rich, and one must do these things economically,—it really does take all the time I have. When I was confirmed the Bishop talked to us so sweetly, and I really meant sincerely to be a good girl,—to be as good as I knew how; but now, when they talk about fighting the good fight and running the Christian race, I feel very mean and little, for I am sure this isn't doing it. But what is,—and who is?"

"Aunt Betsey Titcomb is doing it, I suppose," said Pheasant.

"Aunt Betsey!" said Humming-Bird, "well, she is. She spends all her money in doing good. She goes around visiting the poor all the time. She is a perfect saint;—but O girls, how she looks! Well, now, I confess, when I think I must look like Aunt Betsey, my courage gives out. Is it necessary to go without hoops, and look like a dipped candle, in order to be unworldly? Must one wear such a fright of a bonnet?"

"No," said Jennie, "I think not. I think Miss Betsey Titcomb, good as she is, injures the cause of goodness by making it outwardly repulsive. I really think, if she would take some pains with her dress, and spend upon her own wardrobe a little of the money she gives away, that she might have influence in leading others to higher aims; now all her influence is against it. Her outré and repulsive exterior arrays our natural and innocent feelings against goodness; for surely it is natural and innocent to wish to look well, and I am really afraid a great many of us are more afraid of being thought ridiculous than of being wicked."

"And after all," said Pheasant, "you know Mr. St. Clair says, 'Dress is one of the fine arts,' and if it is, why of course we ought to cultivate it. Certainly, well-dressed men and women are more agreeable objects than rude and unkempt ones. There must be somebody whose mission it is to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to 'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter or a poet, and I have all my artistic nature, such as it is, in dress. I love harmonies of color, exact shades and matches; I love to see a uniform idea carried all through a woman's toilet,—her dress, her bonnet, her gloves, her shoes, her pocket-handkerchief and cuffs, her very parasol, all in correspondence."

"But, my dear," said Jennie, "anything of this kind must take a fortune!"

"And if I had a fortune, I'm pretty sure I should spend a good deal of it in this way," said Pheasant. "I can imagine such completeness of toilet as I have never seen. How I would like the means to show what I could do! My life, now, is perpetual disquiet. I always feel shabby. My things must all be bought at hap-hazard, as they can be got out of my poor little allowance,—and things are getting so horridly dear! Only think of it, girls! gloves at two and a quarter! and boots at seven, eight, and ten dollars! and then, as you say, the fashions changing so! Why, I bought a sack last fall and gave forty dollars for it, and this winter I'm wearing it, to be sure, but it has no style at all,—looks quite antiquated!"

"Now I say," said Jennie, "that you are really morbid on the subject of dress; you are fastidious and particular and exacting in your ideas in a way that really ought to be put down. There is not a girl of our set that dresses as nicely as you do, except Emma Seyton, and her father, you know, has no end of income."

"Nonsense, Jennie," said Pheasant. "I think I really look like a beggar; but then, I bear it as well as I can, because, you see, I know papa does all for us he can, and I won't be extravagant. But I do think, as Humming-Bird says, that it would be a great relief to give it up altogether and retire from the world; or, as Cousin John says, climb a tree and pull it up after you, and so be in peace."

"Well," said Jennie, "all this seems to have come on since the war. It seems to me that not only has everything doubled in price, but all the habits of the world seem to require that you shall have double the quantity of everything. Two or three years ago a good balmoral skirt was a fixed fact; it was a convenient thing for sloppy, unpleasant weather. But now, dear me! there is no end to them. They cost fifteen and twenty dollars; and girls that I know have one or two every season, besides all sorts of quilled and embroidered and ruffled and tucked and flounced ones. Then, in dressing one's hair, what a perfect overflow there is of all manner of waterfalls, and braids, and rats and mice, and curls, and combs; when three or four years ago we combed our own hair innocently behind our ears, and put flowers in it, and thought we looked nicely at our evening parties! I don't believe we look any better now, when we are dressed, than we did then,—so what's the use?"

"Well, did you ever see such a tyranny as this of fashion?" said Humming-Bird. "We know it's silly, but we all bow down before it; we are afraid of our lives before it; and who makes all this and sets it going? The Paris milliners, the Empress, or who?"

"The question where fashions come from is like the question where pins go to," said Pheasant. "Think of the thousands and millions of pins that are being used every year, and not one of them worn out. Where do they all go to? One would expect to find a pin mine somewhere."

"Victor Hugo says they go into the sewers in Paris," said Jennie.

"And the fashions come from a source about as pure," said I, from the next room.

"Bless me, Jennie, do tell us if your father has been listening to us all this time!" was the next exclamation; and forthwith there was a whir and rustle of the silken wings, as the whole troop fluttered into my study.

"Now, Mr. Crowfield, you are too bad!" said Humming-Bird, as she perched upon a corner of my study-table, and put her little feet upon an old "Froissart" which filled the arm-chair.

"To be listening to our nonsense!" said Pheasant.

"Lying in wait for us!" said Dove.

"Well, now, you have brought us all down on you," said Humming-Bird, "and you won't find it so easy to be rid of us. You will have to answer all our questions."