The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866

Baked beans, pumpkin pie, apple-sauce, onions, codfish, and Medford rum,—these were the staple items of the primitive New England larder; and they were an appropriate diet whereon to nourish the caucus-loving, inventive, acute, methodically fanatical Yankee. The bean, the most venerable and nutritious of lentils, was anciently used as a ballot or vote. Hence it symbolized in the old Greek democracies politics and a public career. Hence Pythagoras and his disciples, though they were vegetable-eaters, eschewed the bean as an article of diet, from its association with politics, demagogism, and ochlocracy. They preferred the life contemplative and the fallentis semita vitæ. Hence their utter detestation of beans, the symbols of noisy gatherings, of demagogues and party strife and every species of political trickery. The primitive Yankee, in view of his destiny as the founder of this caucus-loving nation and American democracy, seems to have been providentially guided in selecting beans for his most characteristic article of diet.

But to move on through the market. The butter and cheese stalls have their special attractions. The butyraceous gold in tubs and huge lumps displayed in these stalls looks as though it was precipitated from milk squeezed from Channel Island cows, those fawn-colored, fairest of dairy animals. In its present shape it is the herbage of a thousand clover-blooming meads and dewy hill-pastures in old Berkshire, in Vermont and Northern New York, transformed by the housewife's churn into edible gold. Not only butter and cheese are grass or of gramineous origin, but all flesh is grass,—a physiological fact enunciated by Holy Writ and strictly true.

Porcine flesh is too abundant here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in his diet, is a mystery. Small-boned swine of the Chinese breed, which are kept in the temple sties of the Josses, and which are capable of an obeseness in which all form and feature are swallowed up and lost in fat, seem to be plenty in Quincy Market. They are hooked upright upon their haunches, in a sitting posture, against the posts of the stall. How many pots of Sabbath morning beans one of these porkers will lubricate!

Beef tongues are abundant here, and eloquent of good living. The mighty hind and fore quarters and ribs of the ox,

"With their red and yellow,
Lean and tallow,"

appeal to the good-liver on all sides. They seem to be the staple flesh of the stalls.

But let us move on to the stalls frequented by the ichthyophagi. Homer calls the sea the barren, the harvestless! Our Cape Ann fishermen do not find it so.

"The sounds and seas, with all their finny droves,
That to the Moon in wavering morrice move,"

are as foodful as the most fertile parts of terra firma. Here lie the blue, delicate mackerel in heaps, and piles of white perch from the South Shore, cod, haddock, eels, lobsters, huge segments of swordfish, and the flesh of various other voiceless tenants of the deep, both finned and shell-clad. The codfish, the symbol of Puritan aristocracy, as the grasshopper was of the ancient Athenians, seems to predominate. Our frutti di mare, in the shape of oysters, clams, and other mollusks, are the delight of all true gastronomers. What vegetable, or land animal, is so nutritious? Here are some silvery shad from the Penobscot, or Kennebec, or Merrimac, or Connecticut. The dams of our great manufacturing corporations are sadly interfering with the annual movements of these luscious and beautiful fish. Lake Winnipiseogee no longer receives these ocean visitors into its clear, mountain-mirroring waters. The greedy pike is also here, from inland pond and lake, and the beautiful trout from the quick mountain brook, "with his waved coat dropped with gold." Who eats the trout partakes of pure diet. He loves the silver-sanded stream, and silent pools, and eddies of limpid water. In fact, all fish, from sea or shore, freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, are here, on clean marble slabs, fresh and hard. Ours is the latitude of the fish-eater. The British marine provinces, north of us, and Norway in the Old World, are his paradise.

Man is a universal eater.

"He cannot spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose,
From the earth-poles to the line,
All between that works and grows.

* * * * * *

Give him agates for his meat;
Give him cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring him foods,
From all zones and altitudes;—
From all natures sharp and slimy,
Salt and basalt, wild and tame;
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird and reptile, be his game."

Quincy Market sticks to the cloven hoof, I am happy to say, notwithstanding the favorable verdict of the French savans on the flavor and nutritious properties of horse-flesh. The femurs and tibias of frogs are not visible here. At this point I will quote in extenso from Wilkinson's chapter on Assimilation and its Organs.

"In this late age, the human home has one universal season and one universal climate. The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,—by cunning varieties of shape,—by the insinuation of subtle flavors,—by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,—by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,—by the discovery and cementing of new amities between different substances, provinces, and kingdoms of nature,—by the old truth of wine and the reasonable order of service,—in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable world,—also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed convivial, which run between food and friendship, and make eating festive,—all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our culinary fire raises up new powers and species of food to the human frame, and indeed performs by machinery a part of the work of assimilation, enriching the sense of taste with a world of profound objects, and making it the refined participator, percipient, and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. Man, then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby a thousand new aromas, answering to as many possible tastes in his wonderful constitution, and therefore his food is as different from that of animals in quality as it is plainly different in quantity and resource. How wise should not reason become, in order to our making a wise use of so vast an apparatus of nutrition!…

"There is nothing more general in life than the digestive apparatus, because matter is the largest, if not the greatest, fact in the material universe. Every creature which is here must be made of something, and be maintained by something, or must be landlord of itself.... The planetary dinner-table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal and mineral and wine are grown around it, and set upon it, according to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race.... Hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes upwards from the all-swallowing ground; but thirst descends from above, and is born of the solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. Under this direction, hunger becomes polite; a long-drawn, many-colored taste; the tongue, like a skilful instrument, holds its notes; and thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the tongue and lips, and, full of discrimination, becomes the gladdening love of all delicious flavors.... In the stomach, judging by what there is done, what a scene we are about to enter! What a palatial kitchen and more than monasterial refectory! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a variety of solvents, sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, and raining down from the mouth into the natural patines of the meats! What a quenching of desires, what an end and goal of the world is here! No wonder; for the stomach sits for four or five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will despatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only fairy gifts to the close and spiritual brain."

So far Wilkinson, the Milton of physiologists.

But lest these lucubrations should seem to be those of a mere glutton and gastrolater,—of one like the gourmand of old time, who longed for the neck of an ostrich or crane that the pleasure of swallowing dainty morsels might be as protracted as possible,—let me assume a vegetable, Pythagorean standpoint, and thence survey this accumulation of creature comforts, that is, that portion of them which consists of dead flesh. The vegetables and the fruits, the blazonry of autumn, are of course ignored from this point of view. Thus beheld, Quincy Market presents a spectacle that excites disgust and loathing, and exemplifies the fallen, depraved, and sophisticated state of human nature and human society. In those juicy quarters and surloins of beef and those fat porcine carcasses the vegetable-eater, Grahamite or Brahmin, sees nothing but the cause of beastly appetites, scrofula, apoplexy, corpulence, cheeks flushed with ungovernable propensities, tendencies downward toward the plane of the lower animals, bloodshot eyes, swollen veins, impure blood, violent passions, fetid breath, stertorous respiration, sudden death,—in fact, disease and brutishness of all sorts. A Brahmin traversing this goodly market would regard it as a vast charnel, a loathsome receptacle of dead flesh on its way to putrescence. His gorge would rise in rebellion at the sight. To the Brahmin, the lower animal kingdom is a vast masquerade of transmigratory souls. If he should devour a goose or turkey or hen, or a part of a bullock or sheep or goat, he might, according to his creed, be eating the temporary organism of his grandmother. The poet Pope wrote in the true Brahminical spirit, when he said,—"Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with cries of creatures expiring, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up there. It gives one an image of a giant's den in romance, bestrewed with the scattered heads and mangled limbs of those who were slain by his cruelty." Think of the porcine shambles of Cincinnati, with their swift-handed swine-slayers!

"What loud lament and dismal miserere,"

ear-deafening and horrible, must issue from them. How can a Jew reside in that porkopolitan municipality? The brutishness of the Bowery butchers is proverbial. A late number of Leslie's Pictorial represents a Bowery butcher's wagon crowded with sheep and calves so densely that their heads are protruded against the wheels, which revolve with the utmost speed, the brutal driver urging his horse furiously.

The first advocate of a purely vegetable diet was Pythagoras, the Samian philosopher. His discourse delivered at Crotona, a city of Magna Græcia, is ably reported for posterity by the poet Ovid. From what materials he made up his report, it is impossible now to say. Pythagoras says that flesh-eaters make their stomachs the sepulchres of the lower animals, the cemeteries of beasts. About thirty years ago there was a vegetable diet movement hereabouts, which created some excitement at the time. Its adherents were variously denominated as Grahamites, and, from the fact of their using bread made of unbolted wheat-meal, bran-eaters. There was little of muscular Christianity in them. They were a pale, harmless set of valetudinarians, who were, like all weakly persons, morbidly alive to their own bodily states, and principally employed in experimenting on the effects of various insipid articles of diet. Tea and coffee were tabooed by these people. Ale and wine were abominations in their Index Expurgatorius of forbidden ingesta. The presence of a boiled egg on their breakfast-tables would cause some of the more sensitive of these New England Brahmins to betake themselves to their beds for the rest of the day. They kept themselves in a semi-famished state on principle. One of the most liberal and latitudinarian of the sect wrote, in 1835,—"For two years past I have abstained from the use of all the diffusible stimulants, using no animal food, either flesh, fish, or fowl, nor any alcoholic or vinous spirits, no form of ale, beer, or porter, no cider, tea, or coffee; but using milk and water as my only liquid aliment, and feeding sparingly, or rather moderately, upon farinaceous food, vegetables, and fruit, seasoned with unmelted butter, slightly boiled eggs, and sugar and molasses, with no condiment but common salt."

These ultra-temperance dietetical philosophers never flourished greatly. They were too languid and too little enthusiastic to propagate their rules of living and make converts. In a country where meat is within reach of all, a vegetable dietary is not popular. Doubtless a less frequent use of fleshly food would be greatly to our advantage as a people. But utter abstinence is out of the question. A vegetable diet, however, has great authorities in its favor, both ancient and modern. Plautus, Plutarch, Porphyry of Tyre, Lord Bacon, Sir William Temple, Cicero, Cyrus the Great, Pope, Newton, and Shelley have all left their testimony in favor of it and of simplicity of living. Poor Shelley, who in his abstract moods forgot even to take vegetable sustenance for days together, makes a furious onslaught upon flesh-eating in his Notes to "Queen Mab." The notes, as well as the poem, are crude productions, the outgivings of a boy; but that boy was Shelley. It was said that he was traceable, in his lonely wanderings in secluded places in Italy, by the crumbs of bread which he let fall. Speculative thinkers have generally been light feeders, eschewing stimulants, both solid and liquid, and preferring mild food and water for drink. Those who lead an interior life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, etc. Immanuel Kant was almost the only profound speculative thinker who was decidedly convivial, and given to gulosity, at least at his dinner. Asceticism ordinarily reigns in the cloister and student's bower. The Oxford scholar long ago, as described by Chaucer, was adust and thin.

"As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake."

The ancient anchorets of the East, the children of St. Anthony, were a long-lived sect, rivalling the many-wintered crow in longevity. Yet their lives were vapid monotonies, only long in months and years. They were devoid of vivid sensations, and vegetated merely. Milk-eaters were, in the days of Homer, the longest-lived of men.

Without the ministry of culinary fire, man could not gratify his carnivorous propensities. He would be obliged to content himself with a vegetable diet; for, according to the comparative anatomists, man is not structurally a flesh-eater. At any rate he is not fanged or clawed. His teeth and nails are not like the natural cutlery found in the mouths and paws of beasts of prey. He cannot eat raw flesh. Digger Indians are left to do that when the meat is putrescent. Prometheus was the inventor of roast and boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. Per contra, Horace makes man, in his mast-eating days, a poor creature.

"Forth from the earth when human kind
First crept, a dull and brutish herd, with nails
And fists they fought for dens wherein to couch, and acorns."

Don Quixote, however, in his eloquent harangue to the shepherds in the Sierra Morena, took a different view of man during the acorn period. He saw in it the golden age.

There are vast rice-eating populations in China and India, who are a low grade of men, morally and physically. Exceptional cases of longevity, like those of old Parr, Jenkins, Francisco, Pratt, and Farnham, are often-times adduced as the results of abstemiousness and frugality of living. These exceptional cases prove nothing whatever. These individuals happened to reach an almost antediluvian longevity, thanks to their inherited vitality and their listless, uneventful, monotonous lives. Their hearts beat a dull funeral march through four or five generations, and finally stopped. But the longevity of such mighty thinkers and superb men as Humboldt and Goethe is glorious to contemplate. They were never old, but were vernal in spirit to the last, and, for aught that appears to the contrary, generous livers, not "acid ghouls" or bran-eating valetudinarians. Shakespeare died at fifty-one, but great thinkers and poets have generally been long-lived. "Better fifty years of Europe" or America "than a cycle of" rice-eating "Cathay."

The value of the animals slaughtered in this country in 1860 was, in round numbers, $212,000,000, a sum to make the vegetable feeder stare and gasp. How many thousands and tens of thousands of acres of herbage, which could not be directly available for human consumption as food, had these slaughtered animals incorporated into their frames, and rendered edible for man! "The most fertile districts of the habitable globe," says Shelley, "are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incalculable." On the contrary, the close-feeding sheep and the cow and ox utilize for man millions of acres of vegetation which would otherwise be useless. The domestic animals which everywhere accompany civilized man were a part of them intended as machines to convert herbage into milk and flesh for man's sustenance. The tame villatic fowl scratches and picks with might and main, converting a thousand refuse things into dainty human food. A vegetable diet is out of the question for the blubber-eating Esquimaux and Greenlander, even if it would keep the flame of life burning in their Polar latitudes.

The better and more nutritious the diet, the better the health. It is to the improved garden vegetables and domestic animals that man will hereafter owe the superior health and personal comeliness which he will undoubtedly enjoy as our planet becomes more and more humanized, and man asserts his proper lordship over Nature. This matter of vegetable and animal food is dictated by climate. In the temperate zone they go well mixed. In the tropics man is naturally a Pythagorean, but he is not so strong, or so healthy, or moral, or intellectual, as the flesh-eating nations of northern latitudes.

THE FREEDMAN'S STORY

IN TWO PARTS

PART II

As the Freedman relates only events which came under his own observation, it is necessary to preface the remaining portion of his narrative with a brief account of the Christiana riot. This I extract mainly from a statement made at the time by a member of the Philadelphia bar, making only a few alterations to give the account greater clearness and brevity.

On the 9th of September, 1851, Mr. Edward Gorsuch, a citizen of Maryland, residing near Baltimore, appeared before Edward D. Ingraham, Esquire, United States Commissioner at Philadelphia, and asked for warrants under the act of Congress of September 18, 1850, for the arrest of four of his slaves, whom he had heard were secreted somewhere in Lancaster County. Warrants were issued forthwith, directed to H. H. Kline, a deputy United States Marshal, authorizing him to arrest George Hammond, Joshua Hammond, Nelson Ford, and Noah Buley, persons held to service or labor in the State of Maryland, and to bring them before the said Commissioner.

Mr. Gorsuch then made arrangements with John Agin and Thompson Tully, residents of Philadelphia, and police officers, to assist Kline in making the arrests. They were to meet Mr. Gorsuch and some companions at Penningtonville, a small place on the State Railroad, about fifty miles from Philadelphia. Kline, with the warrants, left Philadelphia on the same day, about 2 p.m., for West Chester. There he hired a conveyance and rode to Gallagherville, where he hired another conveyance to take him to Penningtonville. Before he had driven very far, the carriage breaking down, he returned to Gallagherville, procured another, and started again. Owing to this detention, he was prevented from meeting Mr. Gorsuch and his friends at the appointed time, and when he reached Penningtonville, about 2 a.m. on the 10th of September, they had gone.

On entering the tavern, the place of rendezvous, he saw a colored man whom he recognized as Samuel Williams, a resident of Philadelphia. To put Williams off his guard, Kline asked the landlord some questions about horse thieves. Williams remarked that he had seen the "horse thieves," and told Kline he had come too late.

Kline then drove on to a place called the Gap. Seeing a person he believed to be Williams following him, he stopped at several taverns along the road and made inquiries about horse thieves. He reached the Gap about 3 a.m., put up his horses, and went to bed. At half past four he rose, ate breakfast, and rode to Parkesburg, about forty-five miles from Philadelphia, and on the same railroad. Here he found Agin and Tully asleep in the bar-room. He awoke Agin, called him aside, and inquired for Mr. Gorsuch and his party. He was told they had gone to Sadsbury, a small place on the turnpike, four or five miles from Parkesburg.

On going there, he found them, about 9 a.m. on the 10th of September. Kline told them he had seen Agin and Tully, who had determined to return to Philadelphia, and proposed that the whole party should return to Gallagherville. Mr. Gorsuch, however, determined to go to Parkesburg instead, to see Agin and Tully, and attempt to persuade them not to return. The rest of the party were to go to Gallagherville, while Kline returned to Downingtown, to see Agin and Tully, should Mr. Gorsuch fail to meet them at Parkesburg. He left Gallagherville about 11 a.m., and met Agin and Tully at Downingtown. Agin said he had seen Mr. Gorsuch, but refused to go back. He promised, however, to return from Philadelphia in the evening cars. Kline returned to Downingtown, and then met all the party except Mr. Edward Gorsuch, who had remained behind to make the necessary arrangements for procuring a guide to the houses where he had been informed his negroes were to be found.

About 3 p.m., Mr. Edward Gorsuch joined them at Gallagherville, and at 11 p.m. on the night of the 10th of September they all went in the cars to Downingtown, where they waited for the evening train from Philadelphia.

When it arrived, neither Agin nor Tully was to be seen. The rest of the party went on to the Gap, which they reached about half past one on the morning of the 11th of September. They then continued their journey on foot towards Christiana, where Parker was residing, and where the slaves of Mr. Gorsuch were supposed to be living. The party then consisted of Kline, Edward Gorsuch, Dickinson Gorsuch, his son, Joshua M. Gorsuch, his nephew, Dr. Thomas Pierce, Nicholas T. Hutchings, and Nathan Nelson.

After they had proceeded about a mile they met a man who was represented to be a guide. He is said to have been disguised in such a way that none of the party could recognize him, and his name is not mentioned in any proceedings. It is probable that he was employed by Mr. Edward Gorsuch, and one condition of his services may have been that he should be allowed to use every possible means of concealing his face and name from the rest of the party. Under his conduct, the party went on, and soon reached a house in which they were told one of the slaves was to be found. Mr. Gorsuch wished to send part of the company after him, but Kline was unwilling to divide their strength, and they walked on, intending to return that way after making the other arrests.

The guide led them by a circuitous route, until they reached the Valley Road, near the house of William Parker, the writer of the annexed narrative, which was their point of destination. They halted in a lane near by, ate some crackers and cheese, examined the condition of their fire-arms, and consulted upon the plan of attack. A short walk brought them to the orchard in front of Parker's house, which the guide pointed out and left them. He had no desire to remain and witness the result of his false information. His disguise and desertion of his employer are strong circumstances in proof of the fact that he knew he was misleading the party. On the trial of Hanway, it was proved by the defence that Nelson Ford, one of the fugitives, was not on the ground until after the sun was up. Joshua Hammond had lived in the vicinity up to the time that a man by the name of Williams had been kidnapped, when he and several others departed, and had not since been heard from. Of the other two, one at least, if the evidence for the prosecution is to be relied upon, was in the house at which the party first halted, so that there could not have been more than one of Mr. Gorsuch's slaves in Parker's house, and of this there is no positive testimony.