The Doom of Virginia

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 9, 1864

The Doom of Virginia.

IN Dr. Marks' thrilling book on the "Peninsula Campaign," we have an account of a conversation between himself, in company with his friend Dr. Crawford, and an aged and exceedingly intelligent freedman named Hanson. Hanson's story goes back to the origin of the domestic slave trade in Virginia, and very dramatically and truthfully links the desolations of the present, with the inhumanity of the past. We quote part of the story:

"Just about this time the slave-trade commenced in Virginia. In my early remembrances there was no trade in slaves. If there were any bought and sold, it was in the settlement of estates; and it was made a point of family honor to purchase all the slaves within the circle of the relatives, and not permit families to be separated. In those days people did not speak of negroes as cattle, and as without affection for their children.

"When I had been married four or five years, a trader came from North Carolina to Alexandria in a little schooner, loaded with bacon. For this there happened to be a great demand that year. This man had no intention of commencing a trade in slaves; but some of the planters offered him a young boy or girl, for bacon, and in this way he began to buy, and collected I suppose ten or twelve.

"From this commenced a great trouble amongst us—our hearts trembled with fear. To be carried away, and sold in these distant, new States, was to us occasion of far greater misery than our fathers endured in being stolen from Africa. Every autumn the 'bacon man' returned and others came with him, and there was opened a great trade in negroes.

"I never can forget the wretchedness of those years. We all felt as if a sword was hanging over our heads, and as bad as if we had heard the death angel strike three times over the doors.

"Oh, what dreadful sorrows there, master, in those years! You have heard it said that slaves feel but little, that we do not grieve as the whites; but in this we are greatly wronged. We love more deeply, because we have but little to love. Our masters and mistresses have their carriages, farms, friends, offices, their slaves, their business; but we have none of these; therefore to a negro man all his life and happiness are in his cabin, and when you have taken away from him his wife and children, he has nothing left. Many have I known to die of a broken heart; others never had any joy again after a child or a husband was sold away from them; others I have known to commit suicide.

"For years I have been looking for some great trouble. The people here were far richer and more extravagant, and appeared to me much less religious than those I remember in my youth. They had become cruel, and without mercy torn asunder those whom God had bound together; and a great wail of sorrow and agony went up in the ears of Heaven from all parts of Virginia—wives sorrowing for their husbands; husbands mourning for their wives, and parents weeping for their children, and would not be comforted.

"I knew that a day of vengeance would come for all this, but I did not expect it to fall on us in the way of war between the North and South. I began to fear some heavy curse when the great gangs of chained men were first sent from Virginia, and that the day would soon come when the cup of our iniquities would be full.

"Now all these great and influential families have been ruined, and many of them are wandering beggars. I was a few days since walking in my garden, looking down on the country, and the change of a few months deeply affected me. I looked over on the house and farm of Mrs. Powell. I remember the doctor, her husband a very smart man and her five sons, the most popular young men in the country, and also her beautiful daughters. Her house was the resort of many elegant and wealthy people, but now her sons are in the Confederate Army, her house is a hospital, her beautiful garden trodden down, her orchards destroyed, and the fences all gone.

"There is the house of Mrs. Lee, where, the week that Ellsworth was killed, one of her daughters was married, and the house was filled with gayety and mirth; now the grounds are in ruins, her furniture broken, and all the beautiful things she gathered are scattered. There, too, is the place of Colonel Hunter, his fields open, his barns burnt for fuel, and his house consumed to the ground; and likewise the place of General Lee, one of the finest in Virginia, now used by troops. His grain-fields and meadows were thrown open, and beaten as the high roads.

"At these painful sights my soul was moved and I cried, 'Oh Lord! why has this curse come on Virginia?'

And it appeared to me as plain as I ever heard human speech, a voice spoke to me and said, 'Oh man knowest thou the land most highly favored of heaven, and where because God was good, men became desperately wicked and inflicted the greatest wrongs?' And the voice said, 'Virginia.' Again I heard, 'Knowest thou, oh man! the land where human beings were bred as cattle for the market, and where every year thousands of them were sent forth to a fate which they dreaded more than death?' The answer came, 'Virginia.' Again the voice said, 'Knowest thou the land where in the midst of the greatest blessings, there has been the deepest misery; where most faces were washed with tears, and most hearts torn with anguish: and where the constant wail of distress, inflicted by man on his fellow, was going up into the ears of God?' And the voice said, 'Virginia.' Again the voice said, 'God is just.'

"Then," said the old patriarch, stretching out his arms, and lowering them as if he was relieving his hands of a great weight. "I laid my burden down. And as often as I have mourned since, I have been silenced by that voice, 'God is just.'"—Mute and Blind.