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SLAVERY IN NEW ENGLAND.

BY MISS SEDGEWICK.

BEFORE the American Revolution, slavery extended throughout the United States. In New England it was on a very limited scale. There were household slaves in Boston, who drove the coaches, cooked the dinners, and shared the luxuries of rich houses; and a few were distributed among the most wealthy of the rural population. They were not numerous enough to make the condition a great evil or embarrassment, but quite enough to show its incompatibility with the demonstration of the truth, on which our declaration of Independence is based, that "all men are born equal," and have "an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands. No doubt there were hard masters and cruel mistresses, and so there are cruel fathers and exacting mothers: unrestrained power is not a fit human trust. We know an old man, who, fifty years ago, when strict domestic discipline was a cardinal virtue, and "spare the rod and spoil the child" was written on the lintel, was in the unvarying habit, "after prayers" on a Monday morning, of setting his children, boys and girls, nine in number, in a row, and beginning with the eldest, a lad of eighteen, he inflicted an hebdomadal prospective chastisement down the whole line, to the little urchin of three years. And the tradition goes, that the possible transgressions of the week were never underrated-that these were supererogatory stripes for possible sins, or chance misdemeanors!

But this was a picturesque exception from the prevailing mildness of the parental government, and so were the cruelties exercised upon her slaves by a certain Madame A-, who lived in Sheffield, a border-town in the western part of Massachusetts, exceptional from the general course of patriarchal government. This Madame A belonged to the provincial gentry, and did not live long enough for the democratic wave to rise to her high-water mark. Her husband, as was, and is, not uncommon in New England, combined the duties of the soldier and the magistrate, and honourably discharged both. He won laurels in "the French war," (the war waged in the Northern British provinces), and wore them meekly. The plan of Providence to prevent monstrous discrepancies, by mating the tall with the short, the fat with the lean, the sour with the sweet, &c., was illustrated by General A-and his help-meet. He was the gentlest, most benign of men;

she, a shrew untameable. He was an 'Allworthy,' or 'my Uncle Toby.' He had pity, tolerance, and forgiveness for every human error. There was no such word as error in Madame A- -'s vocabulary. Every departure from her rule of rectitude was criminal. She was the type of punishment. Her justice was without scales as well as blind, so that she never weighed ignorance against error, nor temptation against sin. He was the kindest of masters to his slaves; she, the most despotic of mistresses. Happily for the servile household, those were the days of the fixed supremacy of man. No question of the equality of the sexes had impaired woman's contentment, or provoked man's fear or ridicule. The current of his authority had run undisturbed since first the river Pison flowed out of Eden. No "woman's rights' conventions" had dared to doubt the primitive law and curse, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee:" so that, as we intimated, the servants of Madame A——, suffering under her despotism, had always a right of appeal to a higher tribunal. Whatever petty tyrannies the magnanimous General might quietly submit to in his own person, he never acquiesced in oppression of his people. Among them was a remarkable woman of unmixed African race. Her name was Elizabeth Freeman, transmuted to "Betty," and afterwards contracted by lisping lips from Mammy Bet, to MumBett, by which name she was best known.

It has since been luminously translated in a French notice, into Chut Babet.

*

This woman, who was said by a competent judge to have "no superiors and few equals," was the property," the chattel" of General A-. She had a sister in servitude with her, a sickly timid creature, over whom she watched as the lioness does over her cubs. On one occasion, when Madame A was making the patrol of her kitchen, she discovered a wheaten cake, made by Lizzy the sister, for herself, from the scrapings of the great oaken bowl in which the family batch had been kneaded. Enraged at the "thief," as she branded her, she seized a large iron shovel red hot from clearing the oven, and raised it over the terrified girl. Bet interposed her brawny arm, and took the blow. It cut quite across the arm to the bone, "but," she would say afterwards in concluding the story of the frightful scar she carried to her grave, "Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzy. I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it. I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam,- Why, Betty! what ails your arm?' I only answered--'ask missis!” Which was the slave and which was the real mistress?

* Our readers may have seen some account of this woman by Miss Martineau, I believe, in her "Society in America;" but as that account was but partial, and by a stranger, I have thought that one more extended, without exaggeration or colouring, in every particular true, might be acceptable at a time when "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has excited curiosity as to the individual character of the African race. It was said, perhaps truly, by that distinguished man, Charles Follen, that if you could establish the equality of the slave with the master in a single instance, you had answered the argument for slavery furnished by the inferiority of the African race.

She had another characteristic story of the days of her servitude; and she retained so vivid an impression of its circumstances, that when she related them in her old age, the blood of her hearers would curdle in their veins.

"It was in May," she would say, "just at the time of the apple blossoms; I was wetting the bleaching linen, when a smallish girl came in to the gate, and up the lane, and straight to me, and said, without raising her eyes, where is your master? I must speak with him.' I told her that my master was absent, that he would come home before night. "Then I must stay,' she said, for I must speak with him.' I set down my watering pot, and told her to come with me into the house. I saw it was no common case. Gals in trouble were often coming to master." ("Girls in trouble,' is a definite rustic phrase, indicating but one species of trouble). "But," she continued, "I never saw one look like this. The blood seemed to have stopped in her veins; her face and neck were all in blotches of red and white. She had bitten her lip through; her voice was hoarse and husky, and her eyelids seemed to settle down as if she could never raise them again. I showed her into a bedroom next the kitchen, and shut the door, hoping Madam would not mistrust it, for she never overlooked anybody's wrongdoing but her own, and she had a partic'lar hatred of gals that had met with a misfortin; she could not abide them. She saw me bring the gal in-it was just her luck-she always saw everything. heard her coming and I threw open the bedroom door; for seeing I could no way hide the poor child-she was not over fifteen-I determined to stand by her. When Madam had got half across the kitchen, in full sight of the child, she turned to me, and her eyes flashing like a cat's in the dark, she asked me, 'what that baggage wanted?' 'To speak to master.' 'What does she want to say to your master?' 'I don't know, ma'am.' 'I know,' she said-and there was no foul thing she did n't call the child; and when she had got to the end of her bad words, she ordered her to walk out of the house. Then the gal raised her eyes for the first time; she had not seemed to hear a word before. She did not speak-she did not sigh-nor sob-nor groan-but a sharp sound seemed to come right out of her heart; it was heart-breaking to hear it.

"Sit still, child,' I said. At that Madam's temper rose like a thunder-storm. She said the house was hers, and again ordered the gal out of it. Sit still, child,' says I again. She shall go,' says madam. 'No, missis, she shan't,' says I. 'If the gal has a complaint to make, she has a right to see the judge; that's lawful, and stands to reason beside.' Madam knew when I set my foot down, I kept it down; so after blazing out, she walked away."

One should have known this remarkable woman, the native majesty of her deportment, the intelligence of her indomitable, irresistible will, to understand the calmness of the stranger-girl under her protection, and her sure victory over her hurricane of a mistress.

"When dinner-time came," she continued, "I offered the child

a part of mine; I had no right to take madam's food and give it to her, and I did n't; but, poor little creature, she could no more eat than if she were a dead corpse; she tried when I begged her, but she could not. Master came home at evening." (It might have been noticed of Mum-Bett, that, to the end of her life, when referring to the days of her servitude, she spoke of General Aas "my master," and tenderly, "my old master!" but always of her mistress as Madam.”) “I got speech of master as he was getting off his horse. I told him that there was a poor afflicted gal-a child, one might call her had been waiting all day to speak to him. He bid me bring her in, after supper. I knew Madam would berate her to master, but that did not signify with him. When he sent word he was ready, I took a lighted candle in each hand, and told the child to follow me. She did not seem frightened; she was just as she was in the morning, 'cept that the red blotches had gone, and she was all one dreadful waxy white.

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We went to the study. Master was sitting in his high-backed chair, before his desk. Master could not scare her, he looked so pitiful. I sets down the candles, walked back to the wall, and stood there; I knew master had no objections,-master and I understood one another. Come hither,' says master. The gal walked up to the desk. What is your name?'-Tamor Graham.'-'Take off your bonnet, Tamor.' She took it off. Her hair was brown-a pretty brown, and curly, but all a tangle. Master looked at her." When Mum-Bett got to the point of her story, (every word, as she often repeated it, is "cut in" my memory), the tears started from her eyes, and she quietly wiped them away with the back of her hand. She was not given to tears. They were not her demonstration. "If ever there was a pitiful look," she continued, "it was that look of master's. I can see it yet. Now hold up your hand, Tamor,' he said, ' and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God!' She did. 'Sit down now, child,' he said, and drew a chair himself. She kind of fell into the chair, and clasped her hands tight together."

We cannot, and it is not needful for our purpose that we should, go into the particulars of the wretched girl's story. It was steeped in horrors; in homely rustic life, a repetition of the crime of the Cenci tragedy. The girl had knit her soul to her task, and she went unfalteringly through it.

Once," said Mum-Bett, "my master stopped her, and said, 'Do you know, child, that if your father is committed, and convicted, on your oath, he must die for the crime? Yes, sir, I know it!" You say he has pursued you again and again; why did you not complain before?' 'I escaped, sir,-and for my mother's sake-and my little brother's-poor boy!' and then she burst out like a child, and cried, and cried, and wrung her hands."

After the examination, General A▬▬ gave the girl into MumBett's hands, with orders that every thing should be done for her security and comfort. The father was apprehended-his child was confronted with him. "He was an awful-looking man,"

Mum-Bett said, "He had short grey hair, but not close cropped, and when I led Tamor in, it rose, and every hair stood stiff and upright on his head. I've seen awful sights in my day, but nothing near to that."

Much corroborative testimony was obtained. There was then no court for capital trials in Berkshire, the county of General A-'s residence. The culprit was transferred to Hampshire to be tried. While Tamor remained at the General's she received a message, requesting her to come to a sequestered lane at twilight, to meet her mother. Nothing suspecting, she went, and was seized and carried off, by two men, agents of her father, who hoped to escape by abducting the witness. A posse of militia was called out, and she was found in durance, in a hut in the depth of a wood. The mother and child did meet once, and but once. They locked their arms around each other. The mother shrieked the girl was silent-livid, and when they were parted, more dead than alive.

The father was condemned. The daughter, at her earnest instance, was sent off to a distant province where it was understood she died not long after.

Mum-Bett's character was composed of few but strong elements. Action was the law of her nature, and conscious of superiority to all around her, she felt servitude intolerable. It was not the work-work was play to her. Her power of execution was marvellous. Nor was it awe of her kind master, or fear of her despotic mistress, but it was the galling of the harness, the irresistible longing for liberty. I have heard her say, with an emphatic shake of the head peculiar to her: "Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God's airth a free woman-— I would."

It was soon after the close of the revolutionary war, that she chanced at the village "meeting house," in Sheffield, to hear the Declaration of Independence read. She went the next day to the office of Mr. Theodore Sedgewick, then in the beginning of his honourable political and legal career. "Sir," said she, "I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, "all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?" I can imagine her upright form, as she stood dilating with her fresh hope based on the declaration of an intrinsic, inalienable right. Such a resolve as hers is like God's messengers-wind, snow, and hailirresistible.

Her application was made to one who had generosity as well as intelligence to meet it. Mr. Sedgewick immediately instituted a suit in behalf of the extraordinary plaintiff; a decree was obtained in her favour. It was the first practical construction in Massachusetts of the declaration which had been to the black race a constitutional abstraction, and on this decision was based the freedom of the few slaves remaining in Massachusetts.

Mum-Bett immediately transferred herself to the service of her