Fire on the Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ferry. I don’t mind telling you it has set the Cause back a hundred years. I suspect you and I will disagree on that, but so be it; we can discuss it when I am next in New York, which, God willing and exams be done, will be next month early. I don’t think violence will do anything but enrage the Southerners, and I speak knowingly, being for better or worse, one of them. Not that I am enraged, just worried.
    What if Brown’s attack had failed? Such an undertaking, unfortunate as its effects are now, would have been Disastrous had the abolitionists fallen into the hands of Virginia. Imagine, abolitionists hanged for Treason! I fear it will happen yet; they are for now high in the Blue Ridge, but in the long run they are doomed.
    No slaves joined them and none will. Violence will never free the slave, not only because he is so outnumbered, but because violence is foreign to his nature. I hasten to add: whatsoever my Reason tells me, my Heart is with those who oppose slavery, however I may abhor their methods. Let me tell you a story in strictest confidence. Amazingly, I had, it seems, foreknowledge of Brown’s raid. In June my father had a stroke, which he survived, but in a weakened state. I was called home to Staunton for a week and returned north with my uncle, Reuben Hunter, the Attorney, of Baltimore, my father’s younger brother. Uncle Reuben is forty, between my father and myself in age. Far from resenting the fact that Mint Springs was entailed to my father (and thus to me), he is quite solicitous of the Hunter family honor, and even goes beyond, affecting all the airs of a planter: and even presumes to instruct me in how a Virginia gentleman should act. Needless to say, I never discuss with him my sentiments toward abolition. In short, we’re not close, but blood is thicker than water, and I agreed to ride with him from Winchester, where he had bought two horses, to Baltimore, and proceed by train from there back to school in Philadelphia. It was on this journey, some five miles north of Harper’s Ferry, that we saw a young woman hanging wash outside a little dogtrot house on the mountainside on the Boonesborough Pike. Uncle Reuben pranced his new horse Caesar (which was quite skitterish) across the lawn to ask for water. We didn’t need water, of course, we’d just forded Sassafrass Creek a half mile back, but Uncle Reuben, though married, loves to play the bachelor, at least when his wife’s not around, and show off his traps and manners, sweeping his hat off his head like a Tidewater planter. I stayed on the road since I find these mannerisms ignorant and degrading, not only to the women who must endure them, but to his family and to himself. Of course, since he is my uncle, and I not his, I cannot protest. I happened to hear a clatter from upstairs in the house and looked up and saw—I suppose it doesn’t hurt to tell it now, and to a true abolitionist such as yourself—a negro in the window holding not just a rifle but what I recognized as a new pattern Sharps. Alarmed, I looked out for Uncle Reuben, who was getting a frosty welcome from the woman (whose accent was unexpectedly Northern). Not to be deterred, he was about to dismount, when the door slams and out of the house rushes an old colored mammy, a hanky on her head, her aprons flying, clucking like a hen, swinging a tow sack—Lawdy, Massa! she started yelling that he was trampling her—yarbs ‘n’ narstrums—and boldly grabbing Caesar’s bit, she led the horse back out to the road while its rider looked back helplessly, longingly, and fetchingly, I suppose he imagined, toward the lady. I have known Uncle Reuben to whip slaves like an Irishman, but he was too much playing the gallant to even speak harshly to the old Mammy in front of her lady (plus, he could not trust his horse). By the time I looked back up at the window, the negro with the Sharps had gone. I was careful never to say a word of this to anyone, for I figured we’d stumbled