Experience in St. Michael'sTHE VILLAGE--ITS INHABITANTS--THEIR OCCUPATION AND LOWPROPENSITIES CAPTAN{sic} THOMAS AULD--HIS CHARACTER--HIS SECONDWIFE, ROWENA--WELL MATCHED--SUFFERINGS FROM HUNGER--OBLIGED TOTAKE FOOD--MODE OF ARGUMENT IN VINDICATION THEREOF--NO MORAL CODEOF FREE SOCIETY CAN APPLY TO SLAVE SOCIETY--SOUTHERN CAMPMEETING--WHAT MASTER THOMAS DID THERE--HOPES--SUSPICIONS ABOUTHIS CONVERSION--THE RESULT--FAITH AND WORKS ENTIRELY ATVARIANCE--HIS RISE AND PROGRESS IN THE CHURCH--POOR COUSIN"HENNY"--HIS TREATMENT OF HER--THE METHODIST PREACHERS--THEIRUTTER DISREGARD OF US--ONE EXCELLENT EXCEPTION--REV. GEORGECOOKMAN--SABBATH SCHOOL--HOW BROKEN UP AND BY WHOM--A FUNERALPALL CAST OVER ALL MY PROSPECTS--COVEY THE NEGRO-BREAKER.
St. Michael's, the village in which was now my new home, compared favorably with villages in slave states, generally. There were a few comfortable dwellings in it, but the place, as a whole, wore a dull, slovenly, enterprise-forsaken aspect. The mass of the buildings were wood; they had never enjoyed the artificial adornment of paint, and time and storms had worn off the bright color of the wood, leaving them almost as black as buildings charred by a conflagration.
St. Michael's had, in former years, (previous to 1833, for that was the year I went to reside there,) enjoyed some reputation as a ship building community, but that business had almost entirely given place to oyster fishing, for the Baltimore and Philadelphia markets--a course of life highly unfavorable to morals, industry, and manners. Miles river was broad, and its oyster fishing <145ARRIVAL AT ST. MICHAEL'S>grounds were extensive; and the fishermen were out, often, all day, and a part of the night, during autumn, winter and spring. This exposure was an excuse for carrying with them, in considerable quanties{sic}, spirituous liquors, the then supposed best antidote for cold. Each canoe was supplied with its jug of rum; and tippling, among this class of the citizens of St. Michael's, became general. This drinking habit, in an ignorant population, fostered coarseness, vulgarity and an indolent disregard for the social improvement of the place, so that it was admitted, by the few sober, thinking people who remained there, that St. Michael's had become a very _unsaintly_, as well as unsightly place, before I went there to reside.
I left Baltimore for St. Michael's in the month of March, 1833.
I know the year, because it was the one succeeding the first cholera in Baltimore, and was the year, also, of that strange phenomenon, when the heavens seemed about to part with its starry train. I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle, and was awe-struck.
The air seemed filled with bright, descending messengers from the sky. It was about daybreak when I saw this sublime scene. I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and, in my then state of mind, I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer.
I had read, that the "stars shall fall from heaven"; and they were now falling. I was suffering much in my mind. It did seem that every time the young tendrils of my affection became attached, they were rudely broken by some unnatural outside power; and I was beginning to look away to heaven for the rest denied me on earth.
But, to my story. It was now more than seven years since I had lived with Master Thomas Auld, in the family of my old master, on Col. Lloyd's plantation. We were almost entire strangers to each other; for, when I knew him at the house of my old master, it was not as a _master_, but simply as "Captain Auld," who had married old master's daughter. All my lessons concerning his <146>temper and disposition, and the best methods of pleasing him, were yet to be learnt. Slaveholders, however, are not very ceremonious in approaching a slave; and my ignorance of the new material in shape of a master was but transient. Nor was my mistress long in making known her animus. She was not a "Miss Lucretia," traces of whom I yet remembered, and the more especially, as I saw them shining in the face of little Amanda, her daughter, now living under a step-mother's government. I had not forgotten the soft hand, guided by a tender heart, that bound up with healing balsam the gash made in my head by Ike, the son of Abel. Thomas and Rowena, I found to be a well-matched pair. _He_ was stingy, and _she_ was cruel; and--what was quite natural in such cases--she possessed the ability to make him as cruel as herself, while she could easily descend to the level of his meanness. In the house of Master Thomas, I was made--for the first time in seven years to feel the pinchings of hunger, and this was not very easy to bear.
For, in all the changes of Master Hugh's family, there was no change in the bountifulness with which they supplied me with food. Not to give a slave enough to eat, is meanness intensified, and it is so recognized among slaveholders generally, in Maryland. The rule is, no matter how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it. This is the theory, and--in the part of Maryland I came from--the general practice accords with this theory. Lloyd's plantation was an exception, as was, also, the house of Master Thomas Auld.
