The Childless Mother
A Baltimore physician, man of letters, and friend of Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Evans Snodgrass (1813–1880) edited such journals as The American Museum and the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, and published Sketches of the Baltimore Pulpit (1843) and a brief biography of the abolitionist Benjamin Lundy in 1868. In this sentimental sketch about a mother and baby submitted to The Liberty Bell, he crossed over into a sort of writing normally dominated by women.
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AFTER PRACTISING my profession for a year or two in Virginia, amid the familiar scenes of my boyhood’s mountain-circled home, I removed to Williamsport, a quiet little village on the Maryland side of the romantic Potomac. During my residence in the latter place, an incident occurred, the relation of which will, perhaps, serve a useful purpose, while furnishing as I have been requested to do, “a page for the Liberty Bell.”
At the dawn of a day in early spring, I was startled from slumbers rendered perhaps unusually profound by the labors of the previous day. The cause was a scream, which violently cleft the cold clear air with its piercing agony. I instantly sprang to my feet, only to have my ears saluted by shrieks still more startling. So loud had the voice now become, that it seemed to startle from the bosom of the quiet river echoes such as had perhaps never been heard since the days when its glassy tide used to reflect the war-whoop of the Indian and the scream of the panther.
The voice could readily be distinguished as that of a female, though coarse and harsh in its tones. It soon ceased, however, as if stifled by the very intensity of the agony it had expressed. On subsequent inquiry of a servant, I obtained the following solution of the soul-troubling mystery.
In a hut, a square or two distant, had lived, for some time, a colored woman, the mother of two children, whose wants she had supplied with the labor of her own hands. She had regarded herself as a “free woman”—free as the air of the surrounding hills—and she was so regarded by all who knew her. But she had no “free papers,” having omitted to secure them, it was said, through over-confidence in the source from which she had received a verbal pledge of freedom. A fatal omission, too frequently made by the virtually freed.
Little did that sable woman dream, amid the quiet darkness which enwrapt her toil-worn frame in unconsciousness, that a still harder lot—O, how hard a one—was so near in its awaiting. She was aroused at earliest dawn, by a rap at her humble door. She responded to the signal, and bade the visitants enter. They did so; but for what purpose, suppose you, reader? To talk of work to be done by those who are glad to “ask leave to toil,” or utter other words of cheer? No—alas! No—far different the errand on which they came. One of them claimed her as his “chattel,” and ordered her to be seized as his “slave.” It was done, and she was conveyed, with her oldest child, to the county jail, some six miles distant, there to await the “highest bidder” for the blood and bones of his fellow men!
“Was it the fact of being sold to Georgia, that caused those unearthly shrieks,” you ask? “Is that not a common thing in Maryland?”
It is far too common, I answer with shame; but it was not that which caused such intense agony. The cause was far worse even than this. I will tell.
Nestling warmly in the mother’s bosom, through that sadly terminated night, had lain a babe, but a few weeks old—a babe which, colored though it was, and doomed to become as deep-hued as its sable mother, was her baby still, with all the tender and helpless ways of a baby—and that mother loved it as fondly as the fairest-skinned mother of this land could love her own. But it was deemed an incumbrance to its mother, in the slave-mart. So they tore it rudely from her bosom! It was that which had caused the shriek of agonized affection,—the speechless utterance of a mother’s bereaved and tortured soul! Yes, they tore that tender child from its mother, and she became the inmate of a gloomy prison!
“For what cause?” you ask. “Had the woman committed any crime?”
Not the least possible crime was she guilty of, except it really be a crime to wear a black skin. But she was a slave,—at least she was claimed as such. Besides, you see they only transferred her from one prison to another—for what is slavery but imprisonment? In fact, it is generally imprisonment of the worst kind—imprisonment for life.
“What became of her babe?” some anxious mother impatiently asks.
I cannot answer further than that it was left with a colored woman, who promised its mother to take care of it. This, it is probable, she was allowed to do, until it was old enough for the “Southern market.”
Mothers of the land—ye who have borne children, and felt the feeble pulsations of their little hearts responding to your own—know you not how to commiserate that cruelly bereft mother? I trust that you do. Then plead, and work for the cause of the slave! Strengthen the hands of your husbands, and fathers, and brothers, amid their stern conflict with the giant Wrong—amid their self-denials and their sufferings—in the face of private malice and public scorn! Woman can do much, if faithful to her mission—so much that, with the coöperation of the wives, and mothers, and daughters of our guilty land, the “Liberty Bell” would soon cease to send forth such heart-rending tones as the shrieks of the Childless Mother.
(1847)