402
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Perhaps I shall preach Abolition," Cass said, "someday. Even
here. But not now. I am not worthy to instruct others. Not now. But
meanwhile there is my example.
If
it
is
good, it is not lost. Nothing
is
ever lost."
"Except your mind," Gilbert said, and flung heavily from the
room.
There was a sense of trouble in the air. Only Gilbert's great
wealth and prestige and scarcely concealed humorous contempt for
Oass saved Cass from ostracism, or worse. ("His contempt for me is a
shield," Cass wrote. "He treats me like a wayward and silly child who
may learn better and who does not have to be taken seriously. There–
fore my neighbors do not take me seriously.") But trouble did come.
One of Cass's negroes had a broad-wife on a plantation near by. Mter
she had had some minor trouble with the overseer, the husband stole
her from the plantation and ran away. Toward the Tennessee border
the pair were taken. The man, resisting officers, was shot; the woman
was brought back. "See," Gilbert said, "all you have managed to do is
get one nigger killed and one nigger whipped. I offer my congratula–
tions." So Cass put his free negroes on a boat bound up river, and
never heard of them again.
"I saw the boat head out into the channel, and watched the
wheels churn against the strong current, and my spirit was troubled.
I knew that the negroes were passing from one misery to another, and
that the hopes they now carried would be blighted. They had kissed
my hands and wept for joy, but I could take no part in their rejoicing.
I had not flattered myself that I had done anything for them. What I
had done I had done for myself, to relieve my spirit of a burden, the
burden of their misery and their eyes upon me. The wife of my dead
friend had found the eyes of the girl Phebe upon her and had gone
wild and had ceased to be herself and had sold the girl into misery. I
had found their eyes upon me and had freed them into misery, lest
I should do worse. For many cannot bear their eyes upon them, and
enter into evil and cruel ways in their desperation. There was in Lex–
ington a decade and more before my stay in that city, a wealthy
lawyer named Fielding
L.
Turner, who had married a lady of posi–
tion from Boston. This lady, Caroline Turner, who had never had
blacks around her and who had been nurtured in sentiments opposed
to the institution of human servitude, quickly became notorious for
her abominable cruelties performed in her fits of passion. All persons
of the community reprehended her floggings, which she performed
with her own hands, uttering meanwhile little cries in her throat, ac–
cording to report. Once while she was engaged in flogging a servant
