the issue of March 21, 1861, she wrote to the editor as follows:
My partiality for frenzies is not so absorbing, believe me, as to exclude very painful consideration on the dissolution of your great Union. But my serious fear has been, and is, not for the dissolution of the body but the death of the soul—not of a rupture of states and civil war, but at reconciliation and peace at the expense of a deadly compromise of principle. Nothing will destroy the Republic but what corrupts its conscience and disturbs its fame—for the stain upon the honor must come off upon the flag. If, on the other hand, the North stands fast on the moral ground, no glory will be like your glory.... What surprises me is that the slaves don't rise.
On this great subject Mrs. Browning found her husband in full sympathy with her. Browning himself declared in a letter to an American, September 11, 1861:
I have lost the explanation of American affairs, but I assure you of my belief in the justice and my confidence in the triumph of the great cause. For the righteousness of the principle I want no information. God prosper it and its defenders.14
Two poems by Mrs. Browning at least have to do directly with the Negro and American affairs. One was A Curse for a Nation contributed to the Poems before Congress volume. The poet begins somewhat self-consciously:
I heard an angel speak last night,
And he said "Write!
Write a Nation's curse for me,
And send it over the Western Sea."
She protests her unwillingness to execute such a commission, for, she says,
I am bound by gratitude
By love and blood,
To brothers of mine across the sea,
Who stretch out kindly hands to me.
The angel, however, beats down this unwillingness and the curse follows, the second stanza reading:
Because yourselves are standing straight
In the state
Of Freedom's foremost acolyte,
Yet keep calm footing all the time
On writhing bond-slaves,—for this crime
This is the curse. Write.
At best, however, A Curse for a Nation can hardly help impressing one as a little forced. In rather higher poetic vein is the other poem, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point. This was contributed to The Liberty Bell, a publication issued by the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazar in 1848. Mrs. Browning feared that the poem might be "too ferocious for the Americans to publish." The composition is undoubtedly a strong one. It undertakes to give the story of a young Negro woman who was bound in slavery, whose lover was crushed before her face, who was forced to submit to personal violation, who killed her child that so much reminded her of her white master's face, and who at last at Pilgrim's Point defied her pursuers. With unusual earnestness the poet has entered sympathetically into the subject. The following stanzas are typical:
But we who are dark, we are dark
Ah God, we have no stars!
About our souls in care and cark
Our blackness shuts like prison-bars;
The poor souls crouch so far behind
That never a comfort can they find
By reaching through the prison-bars.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Why, in that single glance I had
Of my child's face, … I tell you all,
I saw a look that made me mad
The master's look, that used to fall
On my soul like his lash … or worse
And so, to save it from my curse,
I twisted it round in my shawl.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
From the white man's house, and the black man's hut,
I carried the little body on;
The forest's arm did round us shut,
And silence through the trees did run:
They asked no question as I went,
They stood too high for astonishment,
They could see God sit on his throne.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Man, drop that stone you dared to lift!—)
I wish you who stand there five abreast,
Each, for his own wife's joy and gift,
A little corpse as safely at rest
As mine in the mangoes: Yes, but she
My keep live babies on her knee,
And sing the song she likes the best.
In such a review as this of the connections between Mrs. Browning and the Negro one can not help coming face to face with the question whether her famous husband was not himself connected by blood with the Negro race. The strain is hardly so pronounced as in men like Alexandre Dumas or Leigh Hunt, and as in the case of Alexander Hamilton, the point still seems to be waiting for final proof. The assertion is persistent, however, and there can be little doubt that such is the case. The standard life of Browning,15 after wrestling in vain with the problem, dismisses it as follows:
Dr. Furnivall has originated a theory, and maintains it as a conviction, that Mr. Browning's grandmother was more than a Creole in the strict sense of the term, that of a person born of white parents in the West Indies, and that an unmistakable dash of dark blood passed from her to her son and grandson. Such an occurrence was, on the face of it, not impossible, and would be absolutely unimportant to my mind, and, I think I may add, to that of Mr. Browning's sister and son. The poet and his father were what we know them, and if Negro blood had any part in their composition, it was no worse for them, and so much the better for the Negro.
Aside from this last point, from the evidence that has been given, while this of course has its limitations, we may safely assert that with her large humanity and her enthusiasm for liberty, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the sturdiest defenders in England of the cause of the American Negro at the time of the beginning of the Civil War. It is to be regretted that she did not live to read the Emancipation Proclamation and to see the Negro started on an era of self-reliance and progress.
PALMARES: THE NEGRO NUMANTIA
One of the most glorious achievements in the history of the Iberian Peninsula was the long and desperate defence of Numantia against the Roman legionaries sent to effect the destruction of the city. When the beleaguered inhabitants could no longer maintain themselves, owing to the shortage of food supplies, they burned the city, and those who were not killed in battle with the Romans committed suicide. Scipio Æmilianus, the Roman leader, entered Numantia to find nothing but burning embers and piles of corpses.
This incident has an almost exact parallel in the history of Brazil—only this time the heroes were Negroes, defending the capital of one of the earliest and one of the strangest Negro republics in the history of the world. The Portuguese, who were the first to introduce Negro slavery into Europe, did not long delay in carrying the institution to their colony of Brazil. It was in 1574 that the first slave ship reached there. Thereafter, great numbers of Negroes were brought, especially to northern Brazil, in the equatorial belt, to work in the profitable
Quoted from
Mrs. Sutherland Orr,
