CHAPTER VI
Early in the year 1858 gold was discovered on Fraser River, in the Hudson Bay Company's territory in the Northwest. This territory a few months later was organized as the Colony of British Columbia and absorbed; is now the western outlook of the Dominion of Canada. The discovery caused an immense rush of gold seekers, traders, and speculators from all parts of the world. In June of that year, with a large invoice of miners' outfits, consisting of flour, bacon, blankets, pick, shovels, etc., I took passage on steamship Republic for Victoria. The social atmosphere on steamers whose patrons are chiefly gold seekers is unlike that on its fellow, where many have jollity moderated by business cares, others reserved in lofty consciousness that they are on foreign pleasure bent. With the gold seeker, especially the "tenderfoot," there is an incessant social hilarity, a communion of feeling, an ardent anticipation that cannot be dormant, continually bubbling over. We had on board upward of seven hundred, comprising a variety of tongues and nations. The bustle and turmoil incident to getting off and being properly domiciled; the confusion of tongues and peculiarity of temperament resembled the Babel of old. Here the mercurial Son of France in search of a case of red wine, hot and impulsive, belching forth "sacres" with a velocity well sustained. The phlegmatic German stirred to excitability in quest of a "small cask of lager and large box of cheese;" John Chinaman "Hi yah'd" for one "bag lice all samee hab one Melican man," while a chivalric but seedy-looking Southerner, who seemed to have "seen better days," wished he "might be – if he didn't lay a pe-yor of boots thar whar that blanket whar." Not to be lost in the shuffle was a tall canting specimen of Yankee-dom perched on a water cask that "reckoned ther is right smart chance of folks on this 'ere ship," and "kalkerlate that that boat swinging thar war a good place to stow my fixin's in." The next day thorough system and efficiency was brought out of chaos and good humor prevailed.
Victoria, then the capital of British Columbia, is situated on the southern point of Vancouver's Island. On account of the salubrity of its climate and proximity to the spacious land-locked harbor of Esquimault it is delightful as a place of residence and well adapted to great mercantile and industrial possibilities. It was the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company, a very old, wealthy, and influential English trading company. Outside the company's fort, enclosing immense storehouses, there were but few houses. The nucleus of a town in the shape of a few blocks laid out, and chiefly on paper maps, was most that gave promise of the populous city of Victoria of the present. On my arrival my goods were sold at great advance on cost, an order for more sent by returning steamer. I had learned prior to starting that city lots could be bought for one hundred dollars each, and had come prepared to buy two or three at that price. A few days before my arrival what the authorities had designated as the "land office" had been subjected to a "Yankee rush," which had not only taken, and paid for all the lots mapped out, but came near appropriating books, benches, and window sashes; hence the office had to close down and haul off for repairs, and surveyed lots, and would not be open for business for ten days. Meanwhile those that were in at the first sale were still in, having real estate matters their own way. Steamers and sailing craft were constantly arriving, discharging their human freight, that needed food, houses, and outfits for the mines, giving an impetus to property of all kinds that was amazing for its rapidity. The next afternoon after the day of my arrival I had signed an agreement and paid one hundred dollars on account for a lot and one-story house for $3,000 – $1,400 more in fifteen days, and the balance in six months. Upon the arrival of my goods ten days later I paid the second installment and took possession. Well, how came I to take a responsibility so far beyond my first intended investment? Just here I rise to remark: For effective purposes one must not be unduly sensitive or overmodest in writing autobiography – for, being the events and memoirs of his life, written by himself, the ever-present pronoun "I" dances in such lively attendance and in such profusion on the pages that whatever pride he may have in the events they chronicle is somewhat abashed at its repetition.
Addison truly says: "There is no passion which steals into the heart more imperceptible and covers itself under more disguises than pride." Still, if in such memoirs there be found landmarks of precept or example that will smooth the ruggedness of Youth's pathway, the success of its mission should disarm invidious criticism. For the great merit of history or biography is not alone the events they chronicle, but the value of the thought they inspire. Previous to purchasing the property I had calculated the costs of alteration and estimated the income. In twenty days, after an expenditure of $200 for improvements, I found myself receiving a rental of $500 per month from the property, besides a store for the firm. Anyone without mechanical knowledge with time and opportunity to seek information from others may have done the same, but in this case there was neither time nor opportunity; it required quick perception and prompt action. The trade my mother insisted I should learn enabled me to do this. Get a trade, boys, if you have to live on bread and apples while attaining it. It is a good foundation to build higher. Don't crowd the waiters. If they are content, give them a chance. We received a warm welcome from the Governor and other officials of the colony, which was cheering. We had no complaint as to business patronage in the State of California, but there was ever present that spectre of oath denial and disfranchisement; the disheartening consciousness that while our existence was tolerated, we were powerless to appeal to law for the protection of life or property when assailed. British Columbia offered and gave protection to both, and equality of political privileges. I cannot describe with what joy we hailed the opportunity to enjoy that liberty under the "British lion" denied us beneath the pinions of the American Eagle. Three or four hundred colored men from California and other States, with their families, settled in Victoria, drawn thither by the two-fold inducement – gold discovery and the assurance of enjoying impartially the benefits of constitutional liberty. They built or bought homes and other property, and by industry and character vastly improved their condition and were the recipients of respect and esteem from the community.
An important step in a man's life is his marriage. It being the merging of dual lives, it is only by mutual self-abnegation that it can be made a source of contentment and happiness. In 1859, in consummation of promise and purpose, I returned to the United States and was married to Miss Maria A. Alexander, of Kentucky, educated at Oberlin College, Ohio. After visits to friends in Buffalo and my friend Frederick Douglass at Rochester, N. Y., thence to Philadelphia and New York City, where we took steamship for our long journey of 4,000 miles to our intended home at Victoria, Vancouver Island. I have had a model wife in all that the term implies, and she has had a husband migratory and uncertain. We have been blessed with five children, four of whom are living – Donald F., Horace E., Ida A., and Hattie A. Gibbs; Donald a machinist, Horace a printer by trade. Ida graduated as an A. B. from Oberlin College and is now teacher of English in the High School at Washington, D. C.; Hattie a graduate from the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin, Ohio, and was professor of music at the Eckstein-Norton University at Cave Springs, Ky., and now musical director of public schools of Washington, D. C.
In passing through the States in 1859 an unrest was everywhere observable. The pulse-beat of the great national heart quickened at impending danger. The Supreme Court had made public the Dred Scott decision; John Brown had organized an insurrection; Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln at the time were in exciting debate; William H. Seward was proclaiming the "irrepressible conflict." With other signs portentous, culminating in secession and events re-enacting history – for that the causes and events of which history is the record are being continuously re-enacted from a moral standpoint is of easy observation. History, as the narration of the actions of men, with attendant results, is but a repetition. Different minds and other hands may be the instruments, but the effects from any given course involving fundamental principles are the same. This was taught by philosophers 2,000 years ago, some insisting that not only was this repetition observable in the moral world, but that the physical world was repeated in detail – that every person, every blade of grass, all nature, animate and inanimate, reappeared upon the earth, engaged in the same pursuits, and fulfilling the same ends formerly accomplished.
However skeptical we may be as to this theory of the ancients, the student of modern history has accomplished little if he fails to be impressed with the important truth standing out on every page in letters of living light – that this great world of ours is governed by a system of moral and physical laws that are as unerring in the bestowal of rewards as certain in the infliction of penalties. The history of our own country is one that will ever be an exemplification of this pre-eminent truth. The protests of the victims of oppression in the old world resulted in a moral upheaval and the establishment by force of arms of a Republic in America. The Revolutionary Congress, of which, in adopting the Federal Constitution, closed with this solemn injunction: "Let it be remembered that it has been the pride and boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature." And it was reserved for the founders of this nation to establish in the words of an illustrious benefactor, "a Government of the people, for the people, and by the people" – a Government deriving all its powers from the consent of the governed, where freedom of opinion, whether relating to Church or State, was to have the widest scope and fullest expression consistent with private rights and public good – where the largest individuality could be developed and the patrician and plebeian meet on a common level and aspire to the highest honor within the gift of the people.
This was its character, this its mission. How it has sustained the character, how fulfilled the mission upon which it entered, the impartial historian has indited, every page of which is redolent with precept and example that point a moral.
With the inauguration of republican government in America the angel of freedom and the demon of slavery wrestled for the mastery. Tallyrand has beautifully and forcibly said: "The Lily and Thistle may grow together in harmonious proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in the separation." The pronounced policy of the best minds at the adoption of the Federal Constitution was to repress it as an institution inhuman in its character and fraught with mischief. Foretelling with accuracy of divine inspiration, Jefferson "trembled for his country" when he remembered that God was just and that "His justice would not sleep forever." Patrick Henry said "that a serious view of this subject gives a gloomy prospect to future times." So Mason and other patriots wrote and felt, fully impressed that the high, solid ground of right and justice had been left for the bogs and mire of expediency.
They died, leaving this heritage growing stronger and bolder in its assumption of power and permeating every artery of society. The cotton gin was invented and the demand for cotton vaulted into the van of the commerce of the country. Men, lured by the gains of slavery and corrupted by its contact, sought by infamous reasoning and vicious legislation to avert the criticism of men and the judgment of God. In the words of our immortal Douglass, "To bolster up and make tolerable what was intolerable; to make human what was inhuman; to make divine what was infernal." To make this giant wrong acceptable to the moral sense it was averred and enacted that slavery was right; that God himself had so predetermined in His wisdom; that the slave could be branded and sold on the auction block; that the babe could be ruthlessly taken from its mother and given away; that a family could be scattered by sale, to meet no more; that to teach a slave to read was punishable with death to the teacher. But why rehearse this dead past – this terrible night of suffering and gloom? Why not let its remembrance be effaced and forgotten in the glorious light of a happier day? I answer, Why?
All measure of value, all estimates of greatness, of joy or sorrow, of health or suffering, are relative; we judge by comparison, and if in recalling these former depths we temper unreasonable criticism of waning friendships, accelerate effort as we pass the mile-stones of achievement, and stimulate appreciation of liberty in the younger generation, the mention will not be fruitless.
But to the resume of this rapid statement of momentous events: Meanwhile, the slave, patient in his longings, prayed for deliverance. Truly has it been said by Elihu Burrit that "you may take a man and yoke him to your labor as you yoke the ox that worketh to live, and liveth to work; you may surround him with ignorance and cloud him over with artificial night. You may do this and all else that will degrade him as a man, without injuring his value as a slave; yet the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. 'Tis allied to his hope of immortality – the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot reach. 'Tis the torch lit up in his soul by the omnipotent hand of Deity Himself." The true and tried hosts of freedom, represented and led by Garrison, Douglass, Lovejoy, Phillips, Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances Ellen Harper, and others – few compared to the indifferent and avowed defenders of slavery, welcoming outrage and ostracism, by pen and on forum, from hilltop and valley, proclaimed emancipation as the right of the slave and the duty of the master. The many heroic efforts of the anti-slavery phalanx were not without effect, and determined resistance was made to the admission of more slave territory which was in accordance with the "Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the Northwest. Slavery controlled the Government from its commencement, hence its supporters looked with alarm upon an increasing determination to stay its progress.
California had been admitted as a free State, after a struggle the most severe. Its admission John C. Calhoun, the very able leader of the slave power, regarded as the death-knell of slavery, if the institution remained within the union and counseled secession. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, in despair at the growth of slavery; Calhoun at that of freedom. But how could this march of moral progress and national greatness be arrested? Congress had, in 1787, enacted that all the territory not then States should forever be reserved to freedom. The slave power saw the "handwriting on the wall" surround it with a cordon of free States; increase their representatives in Congress advocating freedom, and slavery is doomed. The line cherished by the founders, the Gibraltar against which slavery had dashed its angry billows, must be blotted out, and over every rod of virgin soil it was to be admitted without let or hindrance.
Then came the dark days of compromise, the era of Northern fear of secession, and, finally, opinion crystallizing into legislation non-committal, viz: That States applying for admission should be admitted as free or slave States, as a majority of their inhabitants might determine. Then came the struggle for Kansas. Emigration societies were fitted out in the New England and Northern States to send free State men to locate who would vote to bring in Kansas as a free State. Similar organizations existed in the slave States for the opposite purpose.
It is not pleasant to dwell nor fitly portray the terrible ordeal through which the friends of freedom passed. In 1859 they succeeded; right and justice were triumphant, the beneficial results of which will reach remotest time. It was in this conflict that the heroism of John Brown developed. It was there he saw his kindred and his friends murdered, and there registered his vow to avenge their blood in the disenthralment of the slave. The compeers of this "grand old man" or people of the nation could have scarcely supposed that this man, hitherto obscure, was to be the instrument of retributive justice, to inaugurate a rebellion which was to culminate in the freedom of 4,000,000 slaves. John Brown, at the head of a few devoted men, at Harper's Ferry, struck the blow that echoed and re-echoed in booming gun and flashing sabre until, dying away in whispered cadence, was hushed in the joyousness of a free nation. John Brown was great because he was good, and good because he was great, with the bravery of a warrior and the tenderness of a child, loving liberty as a mother her first born, he scorned to compromise with slavery. Virginia demanded his blood and he gave it, making the spot on which he fell sacred for all time, upon which posterity will see a monument in commemoration of an effort, grand in its magnanimity, to which the devotees of liberty from every clime can repair to breathe anew an inspiration from its shrine —
"For whether on the gallows high
Or in the battle's van,
The noblest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man."
The slave power, defeated in Kansas, fearful of the result of the vote in other territories to determine their future status, found aid and comfort from Judge Taney, a Supreme Judge of the United States. Bancroft, the historian, has said: "In a great Republic an attempt to overthrow a State owes its strength to and from some branch of the Government." 'Tis said that this Chief Justice, without necessity or occasion, volunteered to come to the rescue of slavery, and, being the highest court known to the law, the edict was final, and no appeal could lie, save to the bar of humanity and history. Against the memory of the nation, against decisions and enactments, he announced that, slaves being property, owners could claim constitutional protection in the territories; that the Constitution upheld slavery against any act of a State Legislature, and even against Congress. Slavery, previous to 1850, was regulated by municipal law; the slave was held by virtue of the laws of the State of his location or of kindred slave States. When he escaped that jurisdiction he was free. By the decision of Judge Taney, instead of slavery being local, it was national and freedom outlawed; the slave could not only be reclaimed in any State, but slavery could be established wherever it sought habitation.
Black laws had been passed in Northern States and United States Commissioners appointed in these States searched for fugitives, where they had, in fancied security, resided for years, built homes, and reared families, seizing and remanding them back into slavery, causing an era of terror, family dismemberment, and flight, only to be remembered with sadness and horror. For had not the heartless dictum come from a Chief Justice of the United States – the "Jeffry of American jurisprudence," that it had been ruled that black men had no rights a white man was bound to respect?
The slave power, fortified with this declaration, resolved that if at the approaching election they did not succeed they would secede. Lincoln was elected, and the South, true to its resolve, prepared for the secession of its States. Pennsylvania is credited with having then made the last and meanest gift to the Presidency in the person of James Buchanan. History tells of a Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. The valedictory of this public functionary breathing aid and comfort to secession, was immediately followed by South Carolina firing on Fort Sumter, and Southern Senators advised their constituents to seize the arsenals and ports of the nation. Rebellion was a fact.