Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/740

732 from all physical strength. In a family of lone women, there is usually some one whose presence is held to confer safety on the house; she may be a delicate invalid, but she is not afraid. The same quality explains the difference in the demeanor of different companies of men and women, in great emergencies of danger. Read one narrative of shipwreck, and human nature seems all sublime; read another, and, under circumstances equally desperate, it appears base, selfish, grovelling. The difference lies simply in the influence of a few leading spirits. Ordinarily, as is the captain, so are the officers, so are the passengers, so are the sailors. Bonaparte said, that at the beginning of almost every battle there was a moment when the bravest troops were liable to sudden panic; let the personal control of the general once lead them past that, and the field was half won.

The courage of self-devotion, lastly, is the faculty evoked by special exigencies, in persons who have before given no peculiar evidence of courage. It belongs especially to the race of martyrs and enthusiasts, whose personal terrors vanish in the greatness of the object, so that Joan of Arc, listening to the songs of the angels, does not feel the flames. This, indeed, is the accustomed form in which woman's courage proclaims itself at last, unsuspected until the crisis comes. This has given us the deeds of Flora Macdonald, Jane Lane, and the Countess of Derby; the rescue of Lord Nithisdale by his wife, and that planned for Montrose by Lady Margaret Durham; the heroism of Catherine Douglas, thrusting her arm within the stanchions of the doorway to protect James I. of Scotland, till his murderers shattered the frail barrier; and that sublimest narrative of woman's devotion, Gertrude Van der Wart at her husband's execution. It is possible that all these women may have been timid and shrinking, before the hour of trial; and every emergency, in peace or war, brings out some such instances. At the close of the troubles of 1856, in Kansas, a traveller chanced to be visiting a lady in Lawrence, who, in opening her work-basket, accidentally let fall a small pistol. She smiled and blushed, and presently acknowledged, that, when she had first pulled the trigger experimentally, six months before, she had shut her eyes and screamed, although there was only a percussion-cap to explode. Yet it afterwards appeared that she was one of the few women who remained in their houses, to protect them by their presence, when the town was entered by the Missourians,—and also one of the still smaller number who brought their rifles to aid their husbands in the redoubt, when two hundred were all that could be rallied against three thousand, in September of that eventful year. Thus easily is the transition effected!

This is the courage, also, of Africans, as manifested among ourselves, —the courage created by desperate emergencies. Suppled by long slavery, softened by mixture of blood, the black man seems to pass at one bound, as women do, from cowering pusillanimity to the topmost height of daring. The giddy laugh vanishes, the idle chatter is hushed, and the buffoon becomes a hero. Nothing in history surpasses the bravery of the Maroons of Surinam, as described by Stedman, or of those of Jamaica, as delineated by Dallas. Agents of the "Underground Railroad" report that the incidents which daily come to their knowledge are beyond all Greek, all Roman fame. These men and women, who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator and the bloodhound, who have starved on prairies, hidden in holds, clung to locomotives, ridden hundreds of miles cramped in boxes, head downward, equally near to death if discovered or deserted, —and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again, for the sake of wife or child,—what are we pale faces, that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds? What matter, if none, below the throne of God, can now identify that nameless negro in the Tennessee