03.01. The Departure

Chapter 1 The Departure.

-- The Pullman Palace Car -- Southern Rivers And Slavery Songs – Central Depots -- Ohio City of Cleveland -- Mt. Vernon -- The Silver Key -- The Hudson. For many years I have desired to visit the Holy Land. While I realized the omnipresence of the Saviour, and that He was not to be confined to Jerusalem or Mt. Gerizim, and that His gracious presence made all places sacred, yet still the desire remained in the heart to see the earthly city of our God, and to tread the paths, ascend the slopes, and to stand in the places forever made peculiarly and tenderly sacred by the footsteps, and voice, and presence of Jesus, the Son of God. By a combination of providential circumstances the trip was made possible; and so, on Monday evening, June 23, 1890, I found myself bidding farewell to a band of friends who accompanied me to the cars to say God-speed at the beginning of a journey to last four months. When Paul was "accompanied to the ship" by his friends, he was consigned to wind and wave and many perils; but the writer was left in the midst of all the conveniences and luxuries of a Pullman palace car. Cushioned seats; and mirrors reflecting at every angle; a snowy aproned attendant awaiting orders; and an electric bell to summon him. These were some of the contrasting features that served to humble the writer as he recalled the much suffering apostle. After a little time an inviting supper-table, with spotless cloth and shining silverware, is placed before the traveler, who, in spite of hunger, gives most of his observation to the flying scene outside the car window. Later on a pleasant bed takes the place of the table, and the utter dissimilarity to the Pauline experience is established. Surely, we say, the centuries are different, and the treatment of the preachers is different, and the life of a bloated bondholder is today fairly thrust upon the humble traveler. But, softly, let us not go so fast. "Things," said the poet, "are not always what they seem." The bill of fare is anything but a fair bill when the time of settlement comes. As for the bed, curtained as it was, in darkness it proved a stronghold for the mosquitoes that arose at once and claimed the occupant for their own. Rendered desperate by their attacks, the writer raised the car window, when, in ten minutes, he was reduced to the condition of Pompeii, being covered with ashes and cinders from the Vesuvian locomotive. Let us now touch the electric bell, and bring the aproned servant to our relief. But he heeds not the touch. We ring again and again; but, according to Tennyson’s "Mariana," "’He cometh not’, she said." He never did come. We saw and heard others ring for him; but he never responded. If there is anything in the world a Negro hates, it is a bell. Let the ladies speak awhile to this point. The electric bell in the Pullman is an innocent affair, a child-amuser, and a pretty toy; but for the purpose for which it was constructed, it is an utter failure and an useless appendage. Just a word more about this flying palace, and we leave it. The eggs gave out in Southern Alabama, the tomatoes in North Alabama, the ice was exhausted in Tennessee, and the lemons all departed in Kentucky. "Things are not what they seem," said Longfellow. The names of our Southern rivers, as I have crossed the streams one by one, bring back to memory a number of what were called "slavery songs." The Tombigbee, the Tennessee, the Kentucky, and the Ohio each recalled one or more of these peculiarly pathetic melodies. A frequently recurring expression in them was "’Way down." ’Way down upon such a river;’ way down in such a State. Then came the words, "Toiling in the cotton and the cane." There were heartbreaking pictures of separated husbands and wives, and parted parents and children. A child is stolen from its Virginia home; a wife is carried "to Georgia to wear her life away;" a husband languishes in bondage "from the old Kentucky home, far away." The Tennessee, the Ohio, the Suwanee, and other rivers, through the power of song, were made in their meandering to become frames of pictures of unutterable pathos and beauty. The balls and bayonets of 1861-’65 tore away the living painting, but the frames are still left; and I can never look at their pebbly edges and willow margins without thinking of the pictures which they once encased. As a child -- although my father was a slave-owner -- my eyes were often moistened under the influence of these songs of slavery. But my eyes were not the only ones that were wet.

Tears dripped in many States and lands. And these tears meant revolution and deliverance; for when you see thousands of people grieving over a state of things, that means a coming social or moral upheaval; and when a nation gets to singing about its troubles, the day of redemption is nigh. When the Marseilles hymn leaped from lip to lip, and, we might say, flowed from eye to eye, a nation awoke from its long slumber and sprang into freedom. I a m convinced that Song is one of God’s mightiest agencies for the effecting of His purposes, and I feel assured as well, that the songs of slavery, or the Negro melodies did as much, if not more, than speech or book, for the preparing of the people for emancipation. As I have studied the grand central depots that constitute one of the remarkable features of our large cities, I am more than ever impressed that there is one of the great needs of New Orleans.

I know nothing that more impresses a traveler than the focalized travel and business seen at a great central depot. The constant arrival of trains from different quarters of the country, the roar of vehicles, the rush of constantly changing crowds of people, will advertise the city in the most forcible of ways. The Niagara distributed into twenty different channels would hardly be worth visiting; but the Niagara thundering away at one place attracts the nations. Let New Orleans gather up her railroad streamlets and pour them into her corporate lines, in the form of one great Niagara of a central depot. She will never regret it.

Crossing the State of Ohio, diagonally, to Cleveland on its northern edge, we were struck with the fact that we were never a single minute out of the limits of a field of wheat. The forms of Beauty and Prosperity were never out of sight in that wonderful State. It is a nation in itself. The country approximates my conception of English scenery. There are vast expanses of gently undulating table-land. The crops are diversified, and, by their different colors, give a new charm to the landscape. The well-kept fences; the neatly-trimmed hedges, the cosy country homes, buried in orchards, or fronting spacious grassy lawns, and here and there spires or a belfry peeping above a distant line of trees, declaring the presence of town or village -- all combined to bring England constantly to mind. The city of Cleveland, situated beautifully, imposingly and advantageously by that inland sea, Lake Erie, is destined to municipal greatness of the first order. Ten miles away, as we approached over the level fields, we saw a vast cloud hovering over it. It proved to be the smoke of her multitudinous factories.

I am reminded here, that at a point south of Cleveland, several years ago, I deflected from my course on a Northern trip and looked in on Washington City and Mt. Vernon. The day before I started the dentist extracted an aching tooth. In some way I contracted cold in the lacerated spot and went North with the cup of physical woe full to overflowing. In company with twenty or eighty others, I took the steamer that drops down the Potomac every morning from Washington to Mt.

Vernon, twenty miles away. Of all the people that ever visited the place, I think that I bore the most appropriate countenance. A pain that looked like the deepest sorrow was written on every lineament of the face. At the landing we lined up the steep hill to the well-known tomb of Washington. One corpulent lady, just ahead of me, said in a loud voice, in the midst of her labored breathing, "Well, here is George at last!" I have smiled often since at this occurrence, but did not then. I knew but one thing, remembered but one word, and that thing and word was, Pain! And I looked at the tomb of the "Father of His Country" with an agonized expression of countenance that was altogether misunderstood by the people around me, and, doubtless, obtained great credit for me in their minds. They thought I was taking the death of Washington very much to heart, or, perhaps, they supposed I might just have heard he was dead! In making preparation for a distant Journey, after having strapped and marked the baggage, changed greenbacks into circular notes, and armed yourself with a passport, I hear much of the need of carrying along a small silver key. It unlocks no trunk or valise, but opens things of far more delicate character and difficult management. It is said there is no escape from this necessity. The key has to be obtained, carried along, and frequently used. The prince in the Arabian Nights had something of the kind, and closed doors flew open, and what seemed to be blank walls suddenly disappeared at the head of flowery avenues. The shut door and the blank, expressionless wall is one of the great troubles of the traveler. The silver key opens the one, and causes the wall to be full of expression, or, better still, to become a line of beautiful arches through which one passes unchallenged and even welcomed.

I greatly desired to be on the right side of the car as we rushed down the eastern bank of the Hudson River. From this, coveted side you have a view of the river with its ship-sprinkled surface and city-dotted banks, ravishing to behold. Approaching a certain official with the request that I might be accommodated with a seat commanding this quarter of the landscape, I was made to feel that I stood in the presence of an American sphinx. But suddenly I remembered the silver key, and approaching another railroad employee, I inserted the wonderful little instrument, with the request that my seat might be changed. The transformation was marvellous, the sphinx melted away and left a smiling brother after the flesh. He looked upon me affectionately, he seemed to yearn over me -- he changed my seat to the riverside of the car. (I understand that in the far East, that instead of silver, a copper key is used, with like remarkable results.) So I had the pleasure of coming down from Albany to New York on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. What a panorama of beauty it presents to the fascinated eye! How History, and Fiction, and Legend, and Poetry, and great characters and lovely scenery all come down together to its banks and wave their hands in greeting to the passing traveler.

Westward, some ten or fifteen miles away, tower, like a dark-blue thundercloud in the heavens, the Catskill Mountains. On the very top gleams the palace-like front of a great summer hotel that can be seen twenty miles away.

Still further away to the south is a distant range of mountains, the wavy outline of whose summit makes a perfect representation of a recumbent man. Think of a human figure outlined on the sky for fifteen miles. It looks corpselike, while the mountains serve as the bier. The face, cold, grey, upturned to the sky, is to me like that of Washington.

Beautiful and palatial homes are sprinkled on both shores; while the towns and cities, descending from heights to water’s edge, present, both day and night, a most striking appearance. The river itself is dotted all along its length with shipping and pleasure boats. The question arises in me, can the Rhine be any lovelier? Yonder, on the right, at Newburgh, where you see the United States flag floating over an ancient-looking building, was Washington’s headquarters. Lower down the river, on the western side, nestles West Point, the cradle of our military greatness. Washington himself selected the spot.

It is certainly lovely and commanding. The buildings and grounds are on a plateau half way up the tall bluff that faces the river. Further down still is Stony Point, which, if my historical memory is not at fault, was taken from the British by Gen. Wayne in a night assault. Up those rocky sides our men climbed and swept all before them. Strangely, there comes to my mind a verse, suggested by this incident of war. Let, the young reader stop and memorize this stanza of a famous poet: "The heights by great men reached and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight; But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night."

Near this point Washington flung an iron chain across the river to stop the English fleet.

They broke it easily, and called it "the American pumpkin vine." A little further down, on the eastern bank, we pass in a few yards of the place where Arnold and Major Andre had their midnight interview in regard to the surrender of West Point. How they whispered here in these dark woods together. No one heard them; and yet all the world knows today of that guilty midnight conference of wickedness. The leaves overhead sighed over the treachery; The boughs of the trees wrung and tossed their hands in horror, and flung the dark secret to the waves at their feet, and they, the waves, sped away with the history of the act to an astounded nation. So truly did the night-whisper of Judas and the priests become a mighty voice that has filled the world. They thought no one would ever know of a thing whispered in the night! Here was a double guard or wall -- a whisper and the night! They forgot that Jesus said, "There is nothing hid but shall be known."

* * * * * * *