Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848

We have some farther testimony to the judicious strictness with which the worshipful merchants protected their property after it was stowed away; but we do not hear that their "cargo of young lads," as one of them calls it in a confidential letter, was insured. William Wilson, one of the sailors, testified, however, – "that there were several men in the ship besides the sailors, and also several boys and girls; that he saw these boys and girls put on board; that they were brought to the ship in a boat, and were guarded by a number of porters from Aberdeen, who continued to guard them all night till the ship sailed, going home always in the morning and returning at night; that during the day they were guarded by the ship's crew, the one half of whom did the duty of the ship, and the other half took care of the boys and girls, notwithstanding whereof two of them made their escape. Some of these boys appeared to the deponent to be about fourteen years of age, some to be about sixteen or eighteen, and others not to exceed ten or twelve years of age; that after the boys were put on board, the hatches of the ship were put down and locked every night, both while the ship continued in the harbour of Aberdeen, and afterwards when she was at sea."

It will naturally occur to the reader, that though the magistrates and other public officers of a corporation might combine together to perpetrate such acts, they could not carry their authority across the Atlantic, or compel the governors of the foreign possessions of the crown to acknowledge the brand of slavery they had set upon their captives. This naturally suggested itself to us from the beginning, as throwing a doubt over the essential movements of the transaction; but it was speedily cleared away by discoveries very creditable to the ingenuity, if to no other quality, of these astute burgesses. Every captive was indented in the presence of a magistrate, – the captor himself, of course, or some other person engaged in "the servant trade" – and that for a limited number of years. The indenture was certified and transmitted to the place of destination. This expedient brought each captive within the colonial code, which applied very rigorous rules to indented emigrants, – rules which virtually placed them in the category of slaves. These harsh regulations were justified by the circumstance that the class generally consisted of convicts – indenture being the form in which criminals obtained the alternative of transportation as a mitigation of some more dreaded punishment. When the emigrant arrived at Virginia, the ceremony by which he was sold was an assignment of his indenture. This could, of course, only convey a right to the labour of his body for a limited period; but as the convict emigrants required to be under a very potent discipline, powers were put into the hands of the planters by which they were enabled to protract the indented period; and Williamson himself describes with apparent accuracy, – "the children sent off and sold, no doubt to cruel masters, whose ill treatment obliges them often-times to elope to avoid slavery; and as there is no probability of making their escape, as they are always taken and brought back, and for every day they are away from their master they serve a week, and for every week a month, and for every month a year; besides obliged to pay all costs and charges that is advertised for apprehending them, which will probably bring him in a slave for four or five years longer at least."

We shall now, in the briefest shape, give an outline of Williamson's adventures, as detailed by himself, between his removal from the country, and his return to vex his oppressors with multiform litigation.

The vessel stranded on a sand bank at the mouth of the Delaware, and was for some time deserted by its crew, the cargo of boys being left to an anticipated fate, which Williamson says he often in his subsequent miseries wished had really overtaken them. Being afterwards taken on shore, they were relieved by a vessel sailing to Philadelphia, where they were sold "at about £16 per head." "What became of my unhappy companions," says Williamson, "I never knew; but it was my lot to be sold to one of my countrymen, whose name was Hugh Wilson, a North Briton, for the term of seven years, who had in youth undergone the same fate as myself… Happy was my lot in falling into my countryman's power, as he was, contrary to many others of his calling, a humane, worthy, honest man. Having no children of his own, and commiserating my unhappy condition, he took care of me until I was fit for business." He was allowed by his indulgent master occasionally to attend a school, where he picked up some crumbs of education; and finally, at the age of seventeen, he became the old gentleman's heir. After a few vagrant years he married, and settled as a substantial planter near the forks of the Delaware. He was in a place much exposed to the inroads of the French Indians, who, he tells us, in the spirit of the military profession to which he was subsequently attached, "generally appeared in small skulking parties, with yellings, shoutings, and antic postures, instead of trumpets and drums." In one of these inroads they burned his comfortable dwelling and substantial steadings, and carried him off captive. All the world knows what is conveyed in the simple statement of such a fact; and Williamson's description of the tortures he underwent impart little additional horror to the simple announcement of his seizure. It is possible to discern people's nature in their own account of their actions; and not unfrequently do we see the brave man in the description of dangers avoided, as we do the poltroon in the exaggerated account of those courted and overcome. Williamson's narrative conveys the irresistible impression that he was a man of eminently firm nerve, undying hope, and unconquerable energy – such a character as the Indian tribe would respect, and, after a sufficient trial, desire to incorporate with itself. Hence, while others are slowly slaughtered, Williamson is still permitted to live, struggle, and endure. In the difference between his own trials, terrible as they were, and the ignominious brutalities heaped on a poor fellow captive, who met his fate with gentleness, prayers, and weeping, we see the indication of the savage respect paid to the unbroken spirit of the Aberdonian, whose body they might rend inch by inch, but whose spirit remained firm and impenetrable as his native granite. At length, after several months of wandering, he made his escape; and the manner in which he did so was in keeping with his resolute spirit. He planned no stratagems, and consulted no confederates, but fled outright; and, though naked, emaciated, and ignorant of the country, defeated his pursuers by sheer fleetness of foot and endurance of fatigue. Profusely bleeding – without even such a verdant show of clothing as Ulysses endowed himself with when he met Nausica – emaciated to the last extremity, he somewhat astonished and also alarmed a female neighbour by an unceremonious morning call, dropping exhausted on the floor ere he could communicate or receive intelligence. Little need had he too speedily to recover his faculties; the first news he heard was that his broken-hearted wife had not long survived the calamity of his capture. He seems to have now acquired a decided taste for vagrant habits, mingled with a spirit of vindictive animosity towards the Indians, against whom he records several exterminating onsets with a sort of horrible relish. He enlisted himself as a soldier. But American warfare then allowed a far wider latitude for varied military operations than the ordinary experience of the ranks: and sometimes he was an Indian warrior, patiently unravelling and following up a trail; at another time we find him commanding a detachment of colonists as one versed in the native mode of fighting, with the rank and emoluments of a lieutenant. In his little book he details his various military adventures with much spirit and apparent truthfulness. We have from his pen a description of one enterprise, which is a little romance in itself. A lover, hearing that the home of the object of his affections has been desolated, and his beloved carried off by a band of one of the most formidable of the tribes of predatory Indians, in his frantic zeal raises a party of adventurers, with whom he tracks their path. He arrives just in time to save the damsel from the worst horrors of such a fate, and the marauders are put to the sword. The whole narrative has an animation and interest not unworthy of Cooper, who appears to have been acquainted with Williamson's book, and may not improbably have derived from it a part of his information about the military operations of Vaudreuil and Montcalm with the Indians in the French interest. Williamson was indeed a captive at that capitulation of Oswego which has cast so deep a stain on the honour of this commander, and he was soon afterwards sent to England as an exchanged prisoner. He complains that, on his voyage, "though the French behaved with a good deal of politeness, we were almost starved for want of provisions." He arrived at Plymouth in November 1765, and, owing to a severe wound in one of his hands, was discharged as incapable of farther service.

No longer able to apply his energies to Indian warfare, he looked around him for that employment which in his native country would best supply its place, and found it to be – literature. He published "A Brief Account of the War in North America, showing the principal causes of our former miscarriages; as also the necessity and advantage of keeping Canada, and maintaining a friendly correspondence with the Indians." This pamphlet is dated in 1760; and we here mention it, that we may not allow it to interrupt the narrative of the somewhat momentous consequences of a little book which he published two years later, with the title "French and Indian cruelty exemplified, in the Life and various Vicissitudes of fortune of Peter Williamson: containing a particular account of the manners, customs, and dress, of the savages; of their scalping, burning, and other barbarities committed on the English in North America, &c., &c." Mr Williamson was somewhat prolix in his title pages, and we cannot inflict the whole of this one on the reader. It was dedicated, with considerable sagacity, to William Pitt. In the frontispiece there is a full-length portrait of "Mr Peter Williamson, in the dress of a Delaware Indian." Much as Catlin's book and other works have tended to make us acquainted of late with Indian customs, the drapery of this portrait carries with it a decided appearance of accuracy, and attention to detail. The face is probably a likeness. Divest it of the feathered head-gear, it is that of a hard-featured inhabitant of the north-east coast, somewhat impregnated with an air of fierceness and excitement. Contemplate the entire figure: it is certainly a very fair representation of the Indian, such as we have seen him in the few importations exhibited in this country. For several years this representation was one of the main attractions of the booksellers' windows in Scotland; and many an infant has the careless parent or ignorant nurse frightened into constitutional nervousness, by the intimation that the wild man, whose picture had been seen during the morning walks, would appear to the infant in the dark, and visit his misdeeds with some mysterious punishment. Besides the occupation of the literary man, Williamson pursued that of the actor. During the day he sat behind a stall, vending his account of his adventures – in the evening he rehearsed them in the largest room of some popular tavern; where, like Catlin, he made the people acquainted with the costume and habits of the people, of whom he had acquired that acute experience which boys are said to have obtained of the boundary marks where they have been whipped.

In a moment of infatuation, the magistrates of Aberdeen, finding that the interest attached to Williamson's narrative and exhibitions subjected them to unpleasant reflections, resolved to punish him. He had migrated northwards, creating a little public curiosity and wonder wherever he went, until, on reaching his native city, he was brought before the magistrates, charged with a libel on the community, contained in that passage descriptive of his seizure on the pier of Aberdeen, which has been already quoted. The magistrates, being at once the prosecutors and the judges, had little difficulty in committing him; and he was thus very roughly awakened from a dream in which he "began to think himself happy in having endured these misfortunes, a recital of which promised to put him in a more prosperous situation than he had ever hoped for." The stock in hand of his books, amounting to three hundred and fifty copies, was seized and burned in the market-place by the common hangman, and he was committed to prison until he should sign a recantation of the passage containing the account of the kidnapping. The mind that bore up against the fiercest cruelties of the savages, seems to have bowed before these judicial terrors. In the centre of the torturing hordes, without a civilised eye to look on him, he acquired the stern virtues of those on whom he looked —

 
"Impassive, fearing but the shame of fear,
A stoic of the woods, a man without a tear."
 

Among his own people, beneath the shield of British justice, with a public to whom oppression never appeals in vain he sank unmanned; and in utter prostration of spirit he signed the recantation in the terms in which it was desired, and marched out of prison a heartbroken and ruined man.

But the cup of the iniquities of his oppressors was now full, and their hour of retribution was at hand. The blow dealt against them was not so severe as injured justice might have required, but it was dealt with an ignominious scorn that made compensation for its want of severity. There were at that time many men of high spirit and great attainments in the Scottish bar. They knew that the age they belonged to was one, in which the safety of the public liberties was intimately allied with the independence of the bar. It was not an uncommon practice for a few of the ablest and most popular advocates to unite together in vindication of the victim of some formidable system of oppression; and, fortunately for Williamson, his case attracted their generous interest. Andrew Crosbie, the prototype of Scott's Pleydell, threw his whole energies, and they were not small, into this cause. The pleadings at our bar at that time were full of philosophy, general declamation, and poetry; and we have before us some papers from Crosbie's pen which are brilliant and pleasing specimens of this class of forensic rhetoric. At the present day the rhetoric of the law appeals only to the jury, and in the shape of vocal oratory. In the days of our grandfathers it was addressed to the learned bench, and was embodied in carefully prepared written pleadings. The intellectual rank of the audience to be influenced, and the medium of communication, would thus naturally invest the pleadings of these old lawyers with a literary turn, not equalled in the corresponding productions of this age. So we find that Crosbie bursts open the case with these well-turned periods: —

"That liberty which the constitution of this country considers as its favourite object, is the result of the due equipoise which our law has established between the authority of magistrates and the rights of the people. As the relative duties of society must be enforced by the magistrate, and compliance with the laws exacted from the citizens by means of his authority, all the power that is necessary for these salutary purposes is bestowed upon him; and, in the due execution of it, he is not only entitled to the protection of the law, but is an object of its veneration. Yet the same principles that have thus armed him with authority, for the benefit of society, have wisely imposed on him a restraint from abusing it."

The result of these proceedings was, that, in 1762, the Court unanimously awarded to Williamson damages to the extent of £100; and it was declared that, for this sum as well as £80 of costs, the guilty individuals should be personally liable, "and that the same shall be no burden upon the town of Aberdeen." A corporation is a sort of ideal object; it has no personality; it has been pronounced, by a high authority, to have no conscience; it has just one reality about it – it has a purse. Into this purse its members may have been accustomed, from time to time, to dip for the deeds done by them in the flesh – that is, in their corporeal, not their corporate capacity. Perhaps the law, in countenancing this arrangement, considered that the members of a corporation must be so essentially wound up in its interests, that parting with the money of the corporation – that is, with the money of the public – was as great a punishment for their own individual delicts as parting with their own. Be this as it may, the Court decreed that, on this occasion, the public of Aberdeen should not pay for the outrage inflicted on Williamson. Now let us behold the ingenuity with which these worshipful gentlemen baffled the Court, and made the public pay after all. There were certain dues collected by the magistrates, as deputies of the Lord High Admiral of the Coast. It appears that this high official might have applied the sums so levied to his own use, but he had ceased for some considerable time to exact them, and, by consuetude, they had been added to the revenues of the corporation. Now, if the Lord High Admiral had set covetous eyes on this fund, to apply it to his own domestic purposes, the act might have been considered one of unutterable meanness – perhaps the corporation would have resisted it. But, on the other hand, to demand a portion of this money, and use it for getting the members of the corporation out of a scrape, was a highly public-spirited act. The High Admiral assigned £180 from this fund, to pay the damages and costs to Williamson:²¹ it need not be said, that of course this application was suggested to him by persons who had the best reason to believe that the corporation would not resist it, and that all the business arrangements for his operation on the fund were simplified to his hand.

Having been so far successful, Williamson, who seems to have had an insuperable objection to half-measures, raised an action of damages against his kidnappers. It has been asserted, though we do not know on what authority, that the Crown was desirous to institute criminal proceedings against them, but that they were protected by a clause of indemnity in some act of parliament. Williamson boldly laid his damages at £1000. His perseverance drove his adversaries to a series of extraordinary, and in this country, fortunately, unprecedented measures. They persuaded Williamson that it would be for the mutual advantage of the parties to have the matter settled by arbitration, without the costly intervention of the Court of Session. He adopted the advice, and the decision fell to be given by James Forbes of Shiels, Sheriff-Substitute of Aberdeenshire, acting as oversman. We are introduced to this gentleman's convivial character in a most startling manner, by the statement of counsel that the Sheriff's mother, Lady Shiels, "died about the 4th of November, and there can be no doubt that he would get a hearty dose at her burial." It was accordingly on that occasion that the worthy judge appears to have commenced a series of potations, under the pressure of which he speedily followed his parent to the grave. Williamson's affair came through his hands in the very climax of his convivial fit; and both parties seem to have considered it their duty to minister assiduously to these furious cravings, which ever cried with the Cyclop "Δος μοι ἑτι προφρων."

Williamson was not backward in contributing to the Sheriff's conviviality. His own account of his motives was, that knowing Forbes to be prepared to decide unfairly, he wished to keep him so hard at his beloved pursuit of drinking, that he should have no opportunity of exercising his other avocation of judging. Accordingly, he employed a friend "to tenchel and drink" the Sheriff – or, as it is elsewhere expressed, "to drink him hard;" in fact, the operation is talked of quite in an abbreviated and technical form, as a common proceeding in the way of business in the Sheriff Court. The drouthy crony who performed this duty seems to have taken to it with the same disinterested zeal, with which Kean sat up three nights drinking with a friend under depression, for the purpose of keeping up his spirits. The favoured individual must have felt his task coming light to his hands, when he found the Sheriff in a tavern "busy at hot punch about eleven o'clock forenoon." An attempt was made on him by the enemy, but Williamson and his drinking assistant carried him off in triumph to the "New Inn" to dinner, where, however, they were obliged to submit to the presence of the other party, who held a hospitable competition with them in plying the Sheriff with the liquor which he loved. Here they all "sat close drinking, as is the phrase in that part of the country, helter skelter– that is, copiously and alternately of different liquors – till 11 o'clock at night, when Forbes, by this time dead-drunk, was conveyed home by his two servant maids, with the assistance of George Williamson, Gerard, and the Pursuer." This is the counsel's history of the day, and that it is not an exaggerated one, we may infer from an average quotation from the evidence: one of the witnesses thus concludes his narrative: —

"Depones, that from four o'clock in the afternoon to eleven o'clock that night, they all drunk what they call in Aberdeenshire Helter Skelter, alternately of different liquors, and plentifully, in such a way that the Sheriff in particular was very drunk, and the deponent himself was also drunk. That the Sheriff's two servant maids came for him with a lantern to carry him home, and came into the room where the company was, and staid there some time – fully a quarter of an hour – and got some drink, but what it was he cannot tell. That the Sheriff called for a good part of the liquor which was drunk. That at last the deponent assisted to carry home the Sheriff, who was not able to walk; and either the pursuer or Mr Gerard assisted the deponent in so doing; and the two maids went before him with a lantern, and placed him in his easy-chair in his bedroom, and then the Sheriff called upon his maids to give the company drink, which the maids refused to give, and then they came away and left him."

 

Next day the enemy took possession of Forbes by a coup de main. They seized him in bed, half through his drunken sleep, and conveyed him to a favourite houf, kept by a man with the historical name of Archibald Campbell. There "tea and coffee were called for to breakfast, but as these insipid liquors were not to Forbes's mind, a large dose of spirits, white wine, and punch was administered to him, with cooling draughts of porter from time to time." The kidnappers hired a whole floor of the inn for that eventful day – it was the last on which the reference remained valid, so that if it passed without a decision, the question went back to the Court of Session; and the worthy confederates gave express instructions that Williamson was not to obtain access to their conclave, and that Forbes was to be denied to him. That sport of fortune became naturally alarmed when he heard that Forbes was not at home; and knowing instinctively where else he was likely to be, searched for him "in all the taverns in town," as Seldon tells us that the King of Spain was searched for in London when he was outlawed. One of the waiters, in his evidence, stated that Williamson came to the house and "inquired at the deponent if Shiels was there, to which he answered, in obedience to the orders he had received from collector Finlayson, that Shiels was not there; that on this the pursuer left Mr Campbell's house, and (having returned in about an hour) he insisted with the deponent that Shiels was in the house, and that it was to no purpose to deny him, for that he knew by the deponent's face that he was there. But deponent still denied that Shiels was in the house." Deponent was, unfortunately for his professional prospects, not sufficiently brazen-faced for a waiter. The Sheriff was soon brought "up to the mark." Cards were introduced, and they had a roaring day of it. For the sake of appearances, at the time when he was making up his judicial mind, the Sheriff retired to a room alone. Here a message was conveyed to him from his sister, intimating that he had made an appointment for that day, and the time to keep it had arrived. "Whereupon," says a witness, "Shiels touched his nose with his finger, and said 'Jode' – a by-word of his – 'Davie, you see from whence this comes' – that Shiels returned for answer to his servant that he could not go, being engaged about peremptory business." He first spoke about awarding "a trifle" to Williamson. In the end he gave a decision entirely against his claim; and the confederates considered this so great a triumph, that next morning, being Sunday, they were reported to have read the "Decree Arbitral" to a circle of impatient well-wishers on the "Plainstones" or market-place, while the citizens were on their way to church. After having pronounced the decree, the Sheriff, according to the testimony of one witness, "was very merry and jocose, and engrossed a good deal of the conversation;" and the waiter who refused Williamson admission to him had to testify that "he conveyed him home to his own house, as he had done many a night besides that."

There were many picturesque little incidents in the whole affair. Thus we are told by one witness, in a very pathetic strain, of abortive efforts made by the Sheriff to go through the public market-place from one tavern to another. "In a little the Sheriff and the deponent came down to go to the New Inn; and upon the Sheriff's observing that there were too many people upon the exchange, and that he was too far gone in liquor to cross the street, he turned in again to John Bain's, and afterwards made another attempt of the same kind, and returned for the same reason; and a little after two o'clock they made a third attempt, and, observing that the exchange was thin of people, they went over to the New Inn." Discreet Sheriff – he had achieved the Greek sage's problem of knowing himself! But other people knew him, too; and thus the hostess of the inn, being asked if "when Shiels was once drunk, he did not keep in a hand – that is, he continued drunk for some days," answered, that "she has observed Shiels as in drink at one time and to continue so for several days after, and that was too commonly his case; that it is her opinion, when Shiels was in liquor, by flattering of his vanity, he might be very easily induced to do things which he would not otherwise do; and the deponent has had occasion to see several instances of this sort, by which she means that she has heard Shiels, when in liquor, promise to do things which she believes he would not have done if sober; nor does the deponent remember or know that ever Shiels did do any of these things when sober that he said he would do when in liquor."

But there are two sides to all questions; and as human nature has a tendency towards extremes, there were some people prepared to testify to the supernatural and alarming intenseness of the Sheriff's sobriety. It was, we believe, a townsman of this same Sheriff who, when thrown from his horse, being asked by a sympathising lady who was passing, if he were hurt? answered in the intenseness of his politeness – "Oh! no, mem! quite the reverse —quite the reverse." So it appeared in the eyes of some of his friends that Forbes was not merely as sober as a judge, but upon the whole a good deal more sober than a well-constituted judge ought to be – if he had any blemish, it was on the reverse side of intoxication. One of the several landladies whose establishments he frequented – not the lady already quoted – was especially eloquent on this point. "At dinner-time they only drank a bottle of wine and half a mutchkin of punch [the witness makes no allusion to the consumption before and after.] Mr Forbes also drank tea in the deponent's house, and she had occasion to see Mr Forbes at breakfast and dinner, and when he went out of her house when the company parted after supper at night; and upon all these occasions he, Mr Forbes, was perfectly sober, and sufficiently capable of business, and when he went out of her house, she remembers perfectly, she turned in to her servants and said, that she never knew Mr Forbes sit so long in her house on so little drink; and she added, God grant that neither Mr Forbes nor she might be fey." So awful and portentous was his sobriety! Another witness who testified to the production of so many items of liquor that it makes one giddy to read the list, winds up by saying – "After drinking a few glasses, they were told that supper was on the table in another room, to which they moved: That after supper they drank a moderate quantity of wine, and punch, and parted sober about eleven o'clock: That the deponent had a particular proof of Mr Forbes's sobriety after supper, by his maintaining, with great spirit and elocution, one side of a problematical question that occurred in the company."

The law is extremely averse to review the decision of an arbiter. He may be stupid and careless; he may have utterly misunderstood both the law and the facts; but the parties have adopted the reference as a succedaneum to litigation, and they "must stand the hazard of the die." In a few instances, however, where there has been gross corruption, or a palpable combination against one of the parties, the law has interfered to reverse the proceedings. The case of Peter Williamson is one of these instances; and on the 3d of December 1768, some years after the poor Sheriff-Substitute had bidden himself from his disgrace by drinking himself into the grave, the Court awarded Peter Williamson damages to the extent of £200 against the persons who, nearly thirty years previously, had spirited him away from the pier of Aberdeen.