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Updated: August 3, 2024
She could not have had any hopes then at all; it must have been all desperations. That auction-block, that executioner's block, about which so much has been written Jacob's ladder, in his dream, was nothing to what that block appeared nightly in her dreams to her; and the climbers up and down well, perhaps Jacob's angels were his hopes, too.
If Jehovah was an infinite God and knew things from the beginning, He knew that His bible would be a breast-work behind which tyranny and hypocrisy would crouch, and knew His bible would be the auction-block on which the mother would stand while her babe was sold from her, because He knew His bible would be quoted by tyrants; that it would be quoted in defense of robbers called kings, and by hypocrites called priests.
The big doors were rolled back, and "Imogene," the ancient elephant whose fond attachment to Hiram had preserved her from the auction-block, bent her wrinkled front to the soothing sunshine and "weaved" contentedly on her slouchy legs. She was watching her master with the thorough appreciation of one who has understood and loved the "sportin' life."
The sale of the Hawkins property by the Sheriff had followed, and the Hawkins hearts been torn to see Uncle Dan'l and his wife pass from the auction-block into the hands of a negro trader and depart for the remote South to be seen no more by the family. It had seemed like seeing their own flesh and blood sold into banishment. Washington was greatly pleased with the Sellers mansion.
To sell on an auction-block or deliver over to a slave-driver an immortal soul, for which Christ has died, is an enormity before which the Christian sense of right will always recoil in the end. "In this," it is written, "there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor circumcision nor uncircumcision, nor barbarian nor Seythian, nor bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all."
Did He govern this country when it had four millions of slaves? when it turned the cross of Christ into a whipping-post when the holy bible was an auction-block on which the mother stood while her babe was sold from her breast? when bloodhounds were considered apostles? Was God governing the world when the prisoners were confined in the Bastille?
He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults his readers.
The multitude experienced a quick change of feeling and applauded the sentiment. As the judges and officers trudged away with gloomy faces, Provided Southwick descended from the auction-block, and brother and sister went forth into the town free and unharmed.
He answered: "I am thinking, dear, of the agony I suffered when I hadn't money to save you from the auction-block; and I am thinking how the same accursed system is striving to perpetuate and extend itself. The Republic has need of all her sons to stop its ravages; and I feel guilty in staying here, while our Alfred is so heroically offering up his young life in the cause of freedom."
She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices in the next room, around the auction-block. She waited for the trader. She waited for the janitor. At nightfall a file of soldiers entered. They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of the negro-trader. That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of incomprehensibility about her. She hobbled through the auction-room.
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