The men sat staring in
the direction of the noise, tense and waiting.
Nothing happened; somebody had dropped a plate and broken it, perhaps.
But had some natural leader of the enslaved leaped up and shouted at
that juncture, murder would have followed the next moment. Among every
hundred convicts there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong have made
reckless, whose morbid rebelliousness needs, to break forth, only the
shadow of opportunity to kill before being killed, and they accept it.
But it was not to be that day, and we relaxed, and grinned, nervously or
grimly, and resumed our meal.
Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeled
on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily
to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices,
menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and
ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest--these were
men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my
companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American
citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves,
condemned to penal servitude; not citizens, but a class apart and alien;
felons, criminals, no longer entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness, but existing in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless,
parted from friends and families, with present physical pain and mental
misery, and with a future of hounding and helplessness, of fear and
hiding, of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base death!
Upon what plea are these conditions established? Because the slaves had
broken the law--been guilty of crimes.
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