was the composed answer.
"How did you get here?"
"Come in a boat."
"Run away?"
"S'pose so."
"Where did you live?"
"Up de kentry—Horsford County."
"How did you come down here?" "Ben wukkin' on de bres'wuks."
"The dickens you have!"
"Yes, sah."
"How did you get a boat, then?"
"Jes' tuk it—dry so."
"Anybody with you?"
"No, Mahs'r."
"And you came across the Sound alone in an open boat?"
"Yes, Mahs'r; an' fru' de swamp widout any boat."
"I should say so," laughed the officer, glancing at his clothes.
"What did you come here for?"
"Jes'—kase."
"Didn't they tell you you'd be worse off with the Yankees than you were with them?"
"Yes, sah."
"Didn't you believe them?"
"Dunno, sah."
"What do you want to do?"
"Anything."
"Fight the rebs?"
"Wal, I kin du it."
"What's your name?"
"Nimbus."
"Nimbus? Good name—ha! ha: what else?"
"Nuffin' else."
"Nothing else? What was your old master's name?"
"Desmit—Potem Desmit."
"Well, then, that's yours, ain't it—your surname—Nimbus Desmit?"
"Reckon not, Mahs'r."
"No? Why not?"
"Same reason his name ain't Nimbus, I s'pose."
"Well," said the officer, laughing, "there may be something in that; but a soldier must have two names. Suppose I call you George Nimbus?"
"Yer kin call me jes' what yer choose, sah; but my name's Nimbus all the same. No Gawge Nimbus, nor ennything Nimbus, nor Nimbus ennything—jes' Nimbus; so. Nigger got no use fer two names, nohow."
The officer, perceiving that it was useless to argue the matter further, added his name to the muster-roll of a regiment, and he was duly sworn into the service of the United States as George Nimbus, of Company C, of the—Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and was counted one of the quota which the town of Great Barringham, in the valley of the Housatuck, was required to furnish to complete the pending call for troops to put down rebellion. By virtue of this fact, the said George Nimbus became entitled to the sum of four hundred dollars bounty money offered by said town to such as should give themselves to complete its quota of "the boys in blue," in addition to his pay and bounty from the Government. So, if it forced on him a new name, the service of freedom was not altogether without compensatory advantages.
Thus the slave Nimbus was transformed into the "contraband" George Nimbus, and became not only a soldier of fortune, but also the representative of a patriotic citizen of Great Barringham, who served his country by proxy, in the person of said contraband, faithfully and well until the end of the war, when the South fell—stricken at last most fatally by the dark hands which she had manacled, and overcome by their aid whose manhood she had refused to acknowledge.
CHAPTER V.
NUNC PRO TUNC.
The first step in the progress from the prison-house of bondage to the citadel of liberty was a strange one. The war was over. The struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part of the South, was ended, and fate had decided against them. With this arbitrament of war fell also the institution which had been its cause. Slavery was abolished—by proclamation, by national enactment, by constitutional amendment—ay, by the sterner logic which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man could claim his service or restrain his volition. He might go or come, work or play, so far as his late master was concerned.
But that was all. He could not contract, testify, marry or give in marriage. He had neither property, knowledge, right, or power. The whole four millions did not possess that number of dollars or of dollars' worth. Whatever they had acquired in slavery was the master's, unless he had expressly made himself a trustee for their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed, a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded, penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless, nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions. Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family—none of these words had any place in the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still color-blinded by the past.
The fruit of slavery—its first ripe harvest, gathered with swords and bloody bayonets, was before the nation which looked ignorantly on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not comprehend its work; the South could not comprehend its fate. The unbound slave looked to the future in dull, wondering hope.
The first step in advance was taken neither by the nation nor by the freedmen. It was prompted by the voice of conscience, long hushed and hidden in the master's breast. It was the protest of Christianity and morality against that which it had witnessed with complacency for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie. While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bought and sold had hidden this evil from the eye of morality, which had looked unabashed upon the unlicensed freedom of the quarters and the enormities of the barracoon. Now all at once it was shocked beyond expression at the domestic relations of the freedmen.
So they made haste in the first legislative assemblies that met in the various States, after the turmoil of war had ceased, to provide and enact:
I. That all those who had sustained to each other the relation of husband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application to an officer named in each county, be registered as such husband and wife.
2. That all who did not so register within a certain time should be liable to indictment, if the relation continued thereafter.
3. That the effect of such registration should be to constitute such parties husband and wife, as of the date of their first assumption of marital relations.
4. That for every such couple registered the officer should be entitled to receive the sum of one half-dollar from the parties registered.
There was a grim humor about this marriage of a race by wholesale, millions at a time, and nunc pro tunc; but especially quaint was the idea of requiring each freed-man, who had just been torn, as it were naked, from the master's arms, to pay a snug fee for the simple privilege of entering upon that relation which the law had rigorously withheld from him until that moment. It was a strange remedy for a long-hidden and stubbornly denied disease, and many strange scenes were enacted in accordance with the provisions of this statute. Many an aged couple, whose children had been lost in the obscure abysses of slavery, or had gone before them into the spirit land, old and feeble and gray-haired, wrought with patience day after day to earn at once their living and the money for this fee,