There is no doubt that these last developments were in some degree a surprise to Abolitionists, as well as to pro-slavery prophets. They compelled the admission, either that slavery was less demoralizing than had been supposed, or else that this particular type of human nature was less easy to demoralize. It is but a few years since anti-slavery advocates indignantly rejected the assertion that the English peasantry were more degraded than the slaves of South Carolina. Yet no dweller on the Sea Islands can now read a book like Kay's "Social Condition of the English People," without perceiving that the families around him, however fresh from slavery, have the best of the comparison. In the one class the finer instincts of humanity seem dead; in the lowest specimens of the other those instincts are but sleeping. I have seen men and women collected from the rice-fields by the hundred, at the very instant of transition from slavery to freedom. They were starved, squalid, ragged, and ignorant to the last degree; but I could not call them degraded, for they had the instincts of courtesy and the profoundest religious emotions. There was none of that hard, stolid, besotted dulness which seems to reduce the English peasant below the level of the brutes he tends.
And what is surprising, above all, in the freedman's condition, is, not that it shows a recuperative power, but that it has such a wonderful suddenness in the recoil. It is not a growth, but a spring. It reverses the _nihil per saltum_ of the philosophers. In watching them, one is constantly reminded of those trances produced by some violent blow upon the head, from which the patient suddenly recovers with powers intact. One looks for a gradual process, and beholds a sudden illumination. This abates a little of one's wrath at slavery, perhaps, though the residuum is quite sufficient; but it infinitely enhances one's hopes for the race set free. It shows that they have simply risen to the stature of men, and must be treated accordingly.
And, indeed, when one thinks how unexampled in our tame experience is the event which has thus suddenly raised them from their low estate, one must expect to find something unexampled in the result. This is true even where liberty has come merely as a thing to be passively received; but in many cases the personal share of the freedman has been anything but passive. What can most of us know of the awful thrill which goes through the soul of a man, when, having come over a hundred miles of hourly danger out of slavery to our lines, with rifle-bullets whizzing round him and bloodhounds on the trail behind, he counts that for a preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into language at such a time,--and the very highest triumph of the very greatest dramatic genius, if perchance some Shakespeare or Goethe could imagine a kindred utterance. Anything intermediate must be worthless and unavailing.