i came back from winchester for the last time after the election of 1828, to find a great change at home. my father, pressed more and more by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted harrow, and established himself at harrow weald, a hamlet of the large parish in the direction of pinner. he had not given up his farm at harrow. he would have been only too glad to do so, for it involved an annual loss undeviatingly; but that he could not do, for his lease tied him to the stake. but he took another farm at harrow weald, on which there was an old farm-house, which had once been a very good one, and, living there, carried on both farms. how far this speculation was a wise one i have no means of judging. doubtless he took the harrow weald farm upon very largely more advantageous terms than those which he had accepted from lord northwick for the farm at harrow; but having been absent all the time at winchester, i knew so little about the matter that i do not now know even who his harrow weald landlord was. possibly i did know but have forgotten. but i think i remember to have heard my father say that the{151} harrow weald farm did in some decree alleviate the loss sustained by the larger farm at harrow, and that, could he have got rid of the latter, the harrow weald farm might have paid its way. the excellent house he had built at harrow was in the meantime let to mr. cunningham, the vicar.
the change from it to the old farm-house at harrow weald, as a home, was not a pleasant one; but a very far worse and more important change awaited my home coming, in the absence of my mother. she had gone to america.
where, or under what circumstances, my parents had first become acquainted with general la fayette i do not know. i myself never saw him; but i know that it was during a visit to la grange, his estate in france, that my mother first met miss frances wright, one of two sisters, his wards. i believe she became acquainted with camilla wright, the sister, at the same time.
it is odd, considering the very close intimacy that took place between my mother and frances wright, that i never knew anything of the parentage and family of these ladies, or how they came to be wards of general la fayette. but with miss frances wright i did become subsequently well acquainted. she was in many respects a very remarkable personage. she was very handsome in a large and almost masculine style of beauty, with a most commanding presence, a superb figure, and stature fully masculine. her features both in form and expression were really noble. there exists—still findable, i suppose, in{152} some london fonds de magasin—a large lithographed portrait of her. she is represented standing, with her hand on the neck of a grey horse (the same old gig horse that had drawn my parents and myself over so many miles of devonshire, somersetshire, and monmouthshire roads and cross roads—not that which so nearly made an end of us near lynmouth, but his companion), and, if i remember rightly, in turkish trousers.
but these particulars of her bodily form and presentment constituted the least remarkable specialties of her individuality. she was unquestionably a very clever woman. she wrote a slender octavo volume, entitled a few days in athens, which was published by longman. it was little more than a brochure, and it is many years since i have seen it, but the impression that it was very clever abides in my mind. i remember the fact that the whole edition was sold. and the mention of this book reminds me of a circumstance that seems to show that my parents must have become to a considerable degree intimate with these wards of general la fayette at some period preceding the visit to la grange, which exercised in the sequel so large an influence over my own, and my mother’s, and brothers’ future. this circumstance is that i recollect my father to have been in communication with the longmans on behalf of miss wright in respect to her work.
be this how it may, at the time of that visit to la grange spoken of above, miss wright’s thoughts{153} and aspirations were directed with a persistent and indomitable enthusiasm, which made the groundwork of her character, to doing something for the improvement of the condition of the slave populations in the southern states of the great transatlantic republic. both frances and camilla wright were ladies of considerable fortune; and i believe that general la fayette wished much to induce his ward frances not to employ her means in the scheme she was now bent on. but she was of age,—i fancy some six or seven years more than that—and he had no authority to interfere with her purpose, with which besides, otherwise than as likely to be pecuniarily disastrous to her, he entirely sympathised.
her purpose was to purchase a property in the valley of the mississippi—in alabama i think it was—with the slaves upon it, to free them all immediately, and to cultivate the estate by their free labour, living there with them in a sort of community, the principles and plan of which were, i fancy, very largely based upon the ideas and schemes of mr. owen of lanark. his son, robert dale owen, subsequently well known in europe as the author of sundry works on spiritualism and political speculations, and as united states consul at naples and perhaps other cities, was a life-long friend of miss wright’s.
now, my parents had taken with them to la grange my next brother, henry, who has been mentioned as the companion of my early london{154} rambles, and who was then rapidly approaching manhood without having found for himself, or having had found for him, any clear prospect of earning the livelihood which it was clearly enough necessary that he should earn in some way; and miss wright proposed to my mother to bring him to america to join in her projected establishment and experiment at “new harmony”—such i believe to have been the name which miss wright gave to her property. the original name, i think, was nashoba, but my knowledge of any of these matters is very imperfect. i know that the whole scheme ended in complete disappointment to all concerned, and entire failure. to miss wright it involved very considerable pecuniary loss, which, as i learned subsequently from my mother, she bore with the utmost fortitude and cheerfulness, but without any great access of wisdom as regarded her benevolent schemes for the political and economical improvement of human, and especially black, society. i never saw her again; but remember to have heard of her marrying a french teacher of languages at the close of a course of lectures given by her against the institution of matrimony. all that i heard from my mother and my brother of their connection with miss wright, of her administration of affairs at new harmony, and her conduct when her experiment issued in failure and disappointment, left with me the impression of her genuinely highminded enthusiasm, her unselfishness, bravery, and generosity, but, at the same time, of her deficiency{155} in the qualities which can alone make departure from the world’s beaten tracks—mill-horse tracks though they be—either wise, profitable, or safe. she had a fine and large intelligence, but not fine or large enough for going quite unpiloted across country.
whether my mother resided any time at nashoba i am not sure, but i think not. at all events, very shortly after her arrival in america she established herself at cincinnati. and when it became evident that there was no prospect of permanent work for my brother in the business of regenerating the negroes, it was determined—by the advice of what cincinnati friends i know not—that he should join my mother there, and undertake the establishment and conduct of an institution which, as far as i was able to understand the plan, was to combine the specialities of an athen?um, a lecture hall, and a bazaar! and it was when this enterprise had been decided upon, but before any steps had been taken for the realising of it, that i accompanied my father on a visit to america.
when i returned from winchester in july, there were still many months before me of uncertainty whether i might get a vacancy at new college or not, and my father, having determined on going for a short visit to cincinnati, proposed to take me with him. after what i have written in a previous chapter of my early tastes and proclivities, i need hardly say that the prospect of this travel was in the highest degree delightful to me. i am afraid{156} that, at the time, any call to new college, which should have had the effect of preventing it, would have been to me a very unwelcome one. our departure was fixed for september, and the intervening time was spent by me in preparations for the great adventure, very much such as livingstone may be supposed to have made on quitting england for the “dark continent.”
i was, as it seems to me now, still a very boyish boy, all ex-wiccamical prefect as i was, and, i cannot help thinking, younger and more childish than the youngsters of equal age of the present generation.
the voyage, however, really was a bigger affair in those days than it has become in these times, for it was before the iron horse had been trained to cross the atlantic. and my father made it a very much more serious business still by engaging for us berths in the steerage of a passenger ship. i hardly think that he would have done so had he been at all aware of what he was undertaking. it is true that he was undoubtedly hard pressed for money, though i have not now, and had not then any such knowledge of his affairs as to enable me to judge to what degree he was straitened. but there was also about my father a sort of spartan contempt for comfort, and determination not to expend money on his own personal well-being, which was a prominent feature in his character, and which, i have no doubt, contributed to the formation of his resolution to make this journey in the least costly manner possible.{157}
but, as i have said, i think that he had no very clear notion of what a steerage passage across the atlantic implied. as for me, if he had proposed to make the voyage on a raft i should have jumped at the offer! it was, in truth, a sufficiently severe experience. but, as i was then at eighteen, i should have welcomed the chance of making such an expedition, even if i had accurately realised all the accompaniments and all the details of it.
we went on board the good ship corinthian, captain chadwick, bound for new york, in the september of 1828. ship and captain were american.
i confess that my first feeling on entering the place which was to be my habitation during the next few weeks was one of dismay. it was not that the accommodation was rough. i cared little enough about that, and should have cared as little had it been much rougher. but it was the first time in my life that i had had any experience of the truth of the proverb that misfortune makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows! of course there was in that part of the vessel allotted to the steerage passengers no sort of enclosure for the different berths, some dozen or score of them, in which the steerage passengers had to sleep. no sort of privacy either by day or by night was possible; add to which, the ventilation was very insufficient, and the whole place was, perhaps unavoidably, dirty to a revolting degree. my father almost at once betook himself to his berth, and{158} rarely left it during the entire voyage—indeed he was for the most part incapable of doing so, having been suffering from his usual sick headache more or less during the whole time. if the voyage was a bad time for me, it must have been far worse for him. indeed i was scarcely ever below, except when attending on him.
before the first night came, i declared my intention of making no use of the berth assigned to me. where was i to pass the night then? i said i should pass it on deck. i had a huge great coat, a regular “dreadnought,” so called in those days, and made with innumerable capes; and with that i thought i should do well enough during the september night. my declared intention brought an avalanche of ridicule down on my head, not only from my fellow inhabitants of the steerage, but from the captain and his mates. a night on deck, or at the very most two, would make me glad and thankful enough for the shelter of my berth. i did not know what i was talking of, but should soon find out, &c.
well, the first night passed! it was a fine moonlight. and i enjoyed it and the novelty of my surroundings keenly. i slept, wrapped in my capacious great coat, two or three hours at a time, and morning found me none the worse. the second night was less delightful! i was weary and began to feel the need of sleep after a fashion to which i was more accustomed. and then came bad weather, wet and cold! i got some shelter in an{159} erection on the deck called the “round house;” but the want of proper rest was beginning to tell upon me, and the fatigue was very severe. i think that, despite my horror of the steerage and the world that inhabited it, i should have succumbed and accepted its shelter, if my determination not to do so had been confined to my own breast; and no necessity had existed for triumphing over the ridicule and the unanimous prophecies of the other passengers and the ship’s officers. as it was, i was safe not to yield!
i did not yield! our voyage was rather longer than an average one, and during all the thirty-eight days that it lasted, i never passed a night below, or went there at all save for the purpose of changing my clothes, or attending on my father, who lay sick and suffering in his berth during almost the whole time. it was a severer experience than it may seem probably to the imagination of those who never made a similar experiment. when i reached new york, i felt as if it would be heaven to go to sleep for a week.
we had one short spell of very bad weather; and were, as i subsequently learned, in considerable danger for an hour or so. we had been running all day before a fair wind exactly aft, which, continually increasing in violence, assumed at sun-down the force of a gale. nevertheless captain chadwick, against the advice of an old english merchant captain, who was a passenger, could not prevail on himself to lose the advantage of so good a wind,{160} and determined to “carry on.” but as the night advanced the wind continued to increase and the sea to rise, till the danger of being “pooped,” if we continued to run before it, became too great to be neglected. but the danger of putting about, “broaching-to” i believe is the correct term, was also great.
it became necessary however to do this about midnight, and i was the only passenger on deck during the operation. the english merchant captain mentioned above kept running up for a few minutes at a time every now and then. but he had a wife and young children aboard, and would not remain long away from them. the good ship as she came round into the trough of the sea, lay down on her side to such a degree that my body as i clung to the bulwark on the weather-side swung away to the leeward in such sort that i was for a minute hanging from a hold above my head, instead of clinging to one at my side. and i saw and heard—very specially heard—every sail blown away from the yards. i heard, too, the shout of the men on the yards, “we can’t get an inch,” as they strove to reef. much danger was occasioned to the men by the block at the foot of the mainsail remaining attached to the sail, which was blown about, before it could be secured, with a violence which knocked the cook’s galley to atoms.
and all this i saw to my great delight. for i considered a storm at sea as a part of the{161} experiences of a voyage which it would have been a great pity to have missed, and was altogether unaware that we were in any real danger. towards daybreak the gale moderated, and before noon it was perfectly calm, and all hands were busy in bending a new suite of sails.
with all this i should have enjoyed the voyage immensely had it not been for the nature of the companionship to which i should have been condemned if i had not escaped from it in the manner i have described. the utter roughness of the accommodation, the scanty and not very delicate food, would all have signified to me in those days absolutely nothing. but i could not tolerate the companionship of the men and women with whom i should have lived. i could have no doubt tolerated it some twenty years later, but it was at that time too new to me. i take it that ill-luck had given us a rather specially bad lot as our destined companions in the steerage. i had seen quite enough of the labourers on the farm at harrow to know what a man living with his family on a pound a week was like, and i could have managed to live if necessary with such men for a week or two without any insuperable repugnance. but some of the denizens of that steerage bolgia were blackguards of a description quite new to me.
two figures among them are still, after nearly sixty years, present to my mental vision. one was a large, loosely-made, middle-aged man, who always{162} wore a long grey serge dressing-gown. he was accompanied by nobody belonging to him, and i never had the least idea what grade or department of life he could have belonged to. his language, though horrible, as regards the ideas conveyed by it, was grammatically far superior to that of most of those around him; and he was very clever with his hands, executing various little arrangements for his own comfort with the skill of a carpenter, and almost with that of an upholsterer. his face was thoroughly bad, with loose, baggy, flaccid, pale cheeks, and a great coarse hanging under lip. he always looked exceedingly dirty, but nevertheless was always clean shaved. he was always talking, always haranguing those who would listen to him; always extolling the country for which we were bound, and its institutions, and expressing the most venomous hatred of england and all things english. i used to listen to him during my hours of attendance on my father with an excess of loathing, which i doubt not i failed to conceal from him, and which, acting like a strong brine, has preserved his memory in my mind all these years.
the other was much less objectionable. he was a younger man, and called himself a farmer, but his farming had evidently run much to horse-dealing, and he dressed in a horsey style. he had a miserable sickly wife with him, who had once upon a time been pretty. she wore the remains of dresses that had once been smart, and was by far the most slatternly woman i ever saw. her husband, so far as i{163} could observe, did not ill-treat her, but he was constantly saying unkind things in language which should have made her blush, if she had not left all blushes far behind her, and at which the other worse brute used to laugh with obstreperous approbation. he could sing too, as i thought at that time very well, and used to sing a song telling how “the farm i now hold on your honour’s estate, is the same that my grandfather held,” &c. &c. the tune of it runs in my head to this day; and i remember thinking that if the song related the singer’s own fortunes, “his honour” must have gained by the change of tenant, however many generations of ancestors may have held it before him.
by the time our voyage came to an end i was pretty nearly worn out by want of rest and night and day exposure to the weather. but to own the truth honestly, i was supported by a sense of pride in having sustained an amount of fatigue which none other in the ship had, and few probably could have, sustained, and which i had been defied to sustain. and after i had had a sleep “the round of the clock,” as the phrase goes, i was none the worse. moreover, it was a matter of extreme consolation to me to think that i was accumulating a store of strange experiences of a kind which nothing in my previous life had seemed to promise me. but above all the approach to new york, and the sight of the bay, was, i felt, more than enough to repay me for all the discomfort of the voyage. i thought it by{164} far the grandest sight i had ever seen, as indeed it doubtless was.
i do not remember to have been much struck by the town of new york. i remember thinking it had the look of an overgrown colossal village, and that it was very different in appearance from any english city. it seemed to me too that there was a strange contrast between the roomy, clean, uncity-like appearance of the place, and the apparent hurry and energetic ways of the inhabitants. i remember also remarking the very generally youthful appearance of those who seemed to be transacting most of the business of the place.
we were received most kindly by an old friend of my parents, mr. wilkes, the uncle, i think, or perhaps great-uncle of him who as commodore wilkes of the trent subsequently became known to the world, as having very nearly set his country and england by the ears! how and why old mr. wilkes was a friend of my father’s i do not know, but suspect that it was through the medium of some very old friends of my grandfather milton, of the name of garnet. two very old ladies of that name, spinster sisters, i remember to have seen at brighton some twenty or five and twenty years ago. i remember that mr. wilkes struck me as a remarkably courteous and gentlemanlike old man, very english both in manners and appearance, in a blue dress coat and buff waistcoat, and long white hair. i fancy that he was connected in some way (by old friendship only, i imagine,) with the misses{165} wright, and i gathered that he altogether disapproved of frances wright’s philanthropic nashoba enterprise, and consequently of the share in it which my father and mother, on behalf of my brother henry, had undertaken. of the wisdom of his misgivings the result furnished abundant proof.
my recollections of the journey from new york to cincinnati are of a very fragmentary description, those of so very many other journeys during the well nigh sixty years which have elapsed since it was performed have nearly obliterated them. i remember being struck by the uncomfortable roughness of all the lodging accommodation, as contrasted with the great abundance, and even, as it appeared to me, luxury of the commissariat department.
we passed by pittsburg and crossed the alleghany mountains, the former remaining in my memory as a nightmare of squalor, and the latter as a vision of beauty and delight. we travelled long days through districts of untouched forest over the often described “corduroy” roads. i was utterly disappointed by the forests; all that i saw of them appeared to me a miserable collection of lank, unwholesome-looking, woebegone stems, instead of windsor forest on a vastly increased scale, which was, i take it, what i expected. i remember, too, being much struck by the performance of the drivers of the stages over the corduroy roads aforesaid, and often over boggy tracts of half reclaimed forest amid the blackened stumps of burned{166} trees. the things they proposed to themselves to accomplish, and did accomplish without coming to grief, other than shaking every tooth in the heads of their passengers, would have made an english coachman’s hair stand on end! to have seen them at their work over a decent bit of road would on the other hand have provoked the laughter and contempt of the same critics. arms and legs seemed to take an equal part in the work; the whip was never idle, and the fatigue must have been excessive. i do not think that any man could have driven fifty miles at a stretch over those roads.
cincinnati was reached at last. the journey to me had been delightful in the highest degree, simply from the novelty of everything. as things were done at that time it was one of very great fatigue, but in those days i seemed to be incapable of fatigue. at all events it was all child’s play in comparison with my crossing the ocean in the good ship corinthian.
we found my mother and two sisters and my brother henry well, and established in a roomy bright-looking house, built of wood, and all white with the exception of the green venetian blinds. it stood in its own “grounds,” but these grounds consisted of a large field uncultivated save for a few potatoes in one corner of it; and the whole appearance of the place was made unkempt-looking—not squalid, because everything was too new and clean looking for that—by uncompleted essays towards the making of a road from the entrance-gate to the{167} house, and by fragments of boarding and timber, which it had apparently been worth no one’s while to collect after the building of the house was completed. with all this there was an air of roominess and brightness which seemed to me very pleasant. the house was some five or ten minutes’ walk from what might be considered the commencement of the town, but it is no doubt by this time, if it still stands at all, more nearly in the centre of it.
