Before entering on the personal history of a man whose adventures carried him through all the strata of social life, from the feathered savage of the Prairies to the industrious burgess in small-clothes, let us give a few incidental notices of that crime—kidnapping, or man-stealing,—his subjection to which was the opening scene of his eventful career. We can, perhaps, scarcely point to a more distinct type of feebleness in the law of any country than the frequency of this crime. In that community where the people, marked off by any distinction in race or appearance—where persons born in serfdom, or of a particular line, or speaking a peculiar language—are doomed to slavery, the laws may be unjust and barbarous in the extreme, but it does not follow that they are feeble. The slavery exists by them, not in spite of them. It is in the country where the person, free by the law, is seized, and, in defiance of the law, held in forced bondage, in obedience to the interest or the malevolence of individuals, that this characteristic of feebleness is so prominently developed. The purloiner of coin or plate can only be tracked by external incidents; there is nothing in his connexion with the property that in itself proclaims his crime. The horse and cattle-stealer have to deal with less silent commodities; but even the objects of their depredations are not placed in an unnatural position by ownership, and have no voice wherewith to proclaim their custodier's dishonesty. But the man who holds another in possession in a free country, is a criminal in the eye of every one who sees him exercise his ownership; and he carries about with him a perpetual witness and accuser, who is under the strongest inducements to be ever vigilant and ever active. The law under which common thefts are practised, is only that which does not see far into a millstone; but the law under which kidnapping may be pursued with impunity, is deaf, and blind, and, paralytic. Owing to the strong central administration of justice in England, it does not appear that this crime was ever very prevalent in the south. We find, indeed, in Whitelock's Memorials, under the date of 9th May 1645—"An ordinance against such who are called spirits, and use to steal away and take up children, and, bereave their parents of them, and convey them away." The measure then adopted, which will be found among the ordinances of the Long Parliament, shows us that it had become customary to seize children and carry them out of the country, to be employed as slaves in the plantations, or probably to be sold to the Mediterranean pirates. The ordinance says, "Whereas, the houses of Parliament are informed that divers lewd persons do go up and down the city of London and elsewhere, and in a most barbarous and wicked manner steal away many little children, it is ordered by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, that all officers and ministers of justice be hereby straitly charged and required to be very diligent apprehending all such persons as are faulty in this kind, either in stealing, selling, buying, enveigling, purloining, conveying, or receiving children so stolen, and to keep them in safe imprisonment till they may be brought to severe and exemplary punishment. It is further ordered, that the marshals of the Admiralty and the Cinque Ports do immediately make strict and diligent search in all ships, and vessels upon the river, and at the Downs, for all such children, according to such directions as they have, or shall receive from the committee of the Admiralty and Cinque Ports." The few reports we have of English cases of kidnapping are too profusely dressed up with technicalities to permit us to see the naked facts. Shower reports the case of Lees v. Dassigny, the 34th of Charles II. An English common-law reporter never condescends to know the year of the Christian era; he knows only We need no writers of romance to find instances of kidnapping in Scotland before the Union. The vast solitudes which frequently separated inhabited districts from each other, the feudal fortalices scattered hither and thither, the weakness of the crown, the judicial powers possessed by many of the barons; and we may add to this, the spirit of clanship, which surrounded every Highland chief with an army of retainers, as faithful to the preservation of his secrets as they were relentless in avenging his feuds—all conspired to render it too easy for a powerful individual to adopt such a form of outrage against his enemy. Not that the practice was pursued in the manner of a sordid trade, as we have found it followed in England, and as we shall find that at a later period it was adopted among ourselves. The Scots had no colonies to be supplied with this species of living merchandise; and in truth the human animal has seldom been with us so valuable a commodity in the home market, as greatly to raise the cupidity of his neighbour. Those who ventured on kidnapping flew at high game. A young or a The second private captivity of Durie was accomplished on the principle on which an elector is sometimes abstracted. It was for the purpose of defeating his adverse vote on the bench in a cause then before the court. Sir Walter Scott mentions the incident in the notes to the "Border Minstrelsy;" and the reader who remembers his picturesque and spirited narrative may perhaps be amused by seeing how the same event appears in the sober garb of a reporter of decisions. Forbes, in his "Journal of the Session," says—
During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the victorious party frequently found it difficult to dispose of their captives. In England many of them were sent to the plantations; and perhaps the idea which this practice
It may be questioned if these gifts were very valuable to their receivers, or if the coerced labour they inferred was worth possessing. Certainly so little valuable was the mere human being to the community, some thirty years afterwards, that the liberal and patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun pleaded hard for the establishment of slavery in Scotland, not as a privilege to the aristocracy, but as a boon to "so many thousands of our people who are, at this day, dying for want of bread." He saw that sheep and oxen, being property, were cared for and kept alive, and, by a process of reasoning which he seemed to consider a very natural one, he thought that he had but to convert his fellow beings into property, to let them be also cared for. Yet, like all men who conceive social paradoxes, he was haunted by the shadow, cast before, of the revulsion of common sense against his proposal, and thus anticipated the obloquy it would incur. "I doubt not that what I have said will meet, not only with all the misconstruction and obloquy, but all the disdain, fury, and outcries, of which either ignorant magistrates or proud lazy people are capable. Would I bring back slavery into the world? Shall men of immortal souls, and by nature equal to any, be sold as beasts? Shall they and their posterity be for ever subjected to the most miserable of all conditions, the inhuman barbarity of masters, who may beat, mutilate, torture, starve, or kill, so great a number of mankind at pleasure? Shall the far greater part of the commonwealth be slaves, not that the rest may be free, but tyrants over them? With what face can we oppose the tyranny of princes, and recommend such tyranny as the highest virtue, if we make ourselves tyrants over the greatest part of mankind? Can any man, from whom such a thing has escaped, ever offer to speak for liberty? But they must pardon me if I tell them, that I regard not names but things; and that the misapplication of names has confounded every thing." His plan of social reorganisation was, that "every man of a certain estate in this nation should be obliged to take a proportional number of the poor, and employ them in hedging and ditching his grounds, or any other sort of work," while the young were to be "educated in the knowledge of some mechanical art." Here we have one of the earliest undoubted expositions of communism. But Fletcher called things by their accepted names, and for Saint Simon's industriel and chef, we have slave and owner; for Fourier's Phalanges we have gangs. Nor does the illustrious patriot flinch from describing in their proper harsh colours the coercive means necessary There is spirit—almost sympathy in this picture of the desperation of savage liberty; and the enthusiasm with which the lover of his own freedom describes the love of the poor outcasts for theirs, sounds as if it gave the lie to the sincerity of the project. It seems to have had no supporters. The state of "the labour market" did not make the possession of human beings a desirable investment, and landed gentlemen were not anxious to become the owners of their poorer neighbours, for the general good of the community. Kidnappings and deportations for political purposes, still continued to be occasionally practised. One memorable instance was the far-famed story of Lady Grange, to which we propose to dedicate a separate notice, in virtue of our having perused some documents with which the world at large does not seem yet to be acquainted. There is little doubt that occasionally a person who showed a disposition to impart dangerous Jacobite secrets was spirited away to France, to give an account of his views and intentions, under circumstances in which he might not be so likely to forget the obligations he had incurred to the exiled house. Generally speaking, however, kidnapping was worthless in a commercial sense; though Lovat, whose actions were scarcely in conformity with any particular social rule, choosing to have in his service a well-trained London footman, without paying him, got possession of his person, and kept it as safe in his own custody at Castle Dounie as if he had taken him to Algiers. It was, however, when the Scottish trade with the plantations began to open up, soon after the Union, that the disgraceful practice of kidnapping and transporting children became prevalent. The power possessed by many of the chiefs, as independent local judges, with but a nominal responsibility to the control of the crown or the intervention of the supreme courts, gave facilities for this traffic, which poor human nature seems to have been incapable of resisting. The victims were sometimes persons tried and convicted before the hereditary tribunal; and since they must be punished, it were pity to allow an opportunity to be lost, by which the infliction might be turned to the profit of the judge or his friends. Thus we find Lovat, desirous to propitiate the favour of Duncan Forbes, offering his brother a gift of "a few Strathglass rogues," clansmen of his next neighbour and hereditary enemy, whom he had caught in his own domain, and convicted in his own court. He had at first proposed to send them to America; but, as they are "handsome fellows," he offers them to Forbes, for his nephew's Dutch regiment. "I shall send them to him," says the accommodating chief, "without any expense in keeping of them; for I will send immediately orders to carry them south with a guard. There is a captain there of Arthur's regiment, who will receive them and deliver them to Arthur; and I'll send him other two Camerons that are in your prison—tall fellows; and five such good men will do him more service, now that the Dutch expect a war, than thirty men next season." It was in reference to such practices that the engineer officer, who, while employed in laying out the military roads through the Highlands, preserved so many shrewd remarks on
But our more immediate concern, in the present instance, is with no frightful feudal baron, presiding over chains and dungeons, in the mysterious recesses of his own solitary moated tower. The offenders exposed in Peter Williamson's history, were grave, sober burghers—bailies and town-councillors of one of the most worshipful and respectable corporations in the United Kingdom—men of peace, staid in their demeanour, cautious in their walk of life—careful not to rub their smooth, well-brushed broad-cloth against any impure thing. Their proceedings had the fairest and most innocent appearance: men of industry and business themselves, keepers of their bonds and engagements, they were but somewhat rigid in exacting industry and punctual performance of obligations from others. "Kidnapping," "crimping," "deforcement," "slavery," were words unknown in their vocabulary,—they did but hire servants: it was nominally for a period of years, it might happen to be virtually for life; it might be to bear the burden, under a tropical sun, in the steaming swamps of the Antillas—still it was a mere contract. They would have been frightened by the name of a slave-ship, but they meekly acknowledged that they freighted vessels "in the servant trade," with "cargoes of boys." "For them alone did seethe A thousand men in troubles wide and dark: Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel." Many years had passed over the guilty traffic, ere an accident having disturbed the placid surface it assumed to the world, some men of honour, courage, and high station resolved to probe its mysteries; and discovered that the sleek burgesses, by their corporate authority, had been able noiselessly to accomplish as wide and devastating a tyranny as ever had been revealed by the dungeons of some mouldering baronial tower to frighten this world against feudality. Peter Williamson was born at Hirnley, in the parish of Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, the clergyman of which mentions him in the statistical account, along with the celebrated Father Innes, and Ross, the author of "the Fortunate Shepherdess," as one of the eminent men connected with his parish. The district, though situated on the slopes of the higher Grampians, has not, within the reach of history, been inhabited by Celts, and Williamson's name speaks to his Saxon origin. He says he was, "if not of rich, yet of reputable parents;" and they evidently belonged to a poor and frugal, but independent class, who may still be found rearing their humble fortunes on those somewhat sterile uplands, neither as masters nor as servants, but each independently farming his own croft. One of the witnesses, examined more than twenty years afterwards, said "he knew James Williamson having a plough going in Upper Balnacraig, to the best of the deponent's remembrance, and heard he had likewise a plough going in Hirnley, when he lived there; and that he was in such circumstances as to keep his children and his family,
We shall take our further notices of this occurrence from a very different source—a huge bundle of papers, chiefly printed, consisting of the documents connected with the long train of litigation in which Williamson was subsequently involved, owing to the publication of the passage we have just cited. The papers consist of pleadings, accounts, letters, and the testimonies of witnesses—a sort of mass in which it is clear from the beginning that one cannot fail to find curious things by boring holes through it here and there. We are not aware that this valuable source of information about the manners of the place and period has ever been heretofore applied to literary uses, with the exception of some references made to it, in a curious and very able compendium of provincial lore, called "The Book of Bon Accord, or a guide to the city of Aberdeen;" a work which, like "Tooke's diversions of Purley," not unknown to collectors of juvenile circulating libraries, appears to have been christened with some peculiar object of hiding the learning and ingenuity of its contents under a frivolous exterior. At the time when legal investigations were commenced, Williamson was a man in middle life, who had gone through adventures and vicissitudes enough for a century of ordinary human existence. The first step was to identify the trained travelled man with the poor boy who had mysteriously disappeared from the streets of Aberdeen; and the next to prove the act of kidnapping. Several witnesses remembered Williamson; he was described by them as "a rough, ragged, bumble-headed, long, stourie clever boy, by which is meant a growthy boy;" and "a stout, clever, rough loon, and very ill to guide, and very ragged till he got clothes." A neighbour of the old crofter said he believed, "upwards of four years before the battle of Culloden, it was the general report of the country, that when the said Peter Williamson was a little boy going with a clipped head, he was taken at Aberdeen, and carried to Philadelphia with several other boys." He remembered conversations with the youth's father, who complained that "he came into Aberdeen seeking his son Peter, but they would not let him near hand him; that his son Peter was in a barn in Aberdeen, and they would not let him speak with him;" and, "that the merchants in Aberdeen had carried away his son to Philadelphia, and sold him for a slave"—observing, that it was commonly rumoured that several merchants there, whom he named, "did deal in that way of carrying away boys;" and he concluded by saying "he saw the father shed many salt tears on that account." The session clerk, who had been at Peter's baptism, recognised him when he saw him, as "the same identical Peter Williamson at whose baptism he had been present," and confirmed the story of his father's having attempted in vain to get access to him in the barn, characterising the old man's lamentation as "very sore and grievous." Mr Fraser of Findrac, a The investigation brought to light some other cases, and gradually opened up the whole mystery of iniquity. One old woman, the miller's widow, who remembered that Peter "was sent into Aberdeen, to be under his aunts, his mother being dead, and that soon thereafter he was missing," said that in the parish of Aboyne "they were generally afraid to send their boys on errands to Aberdeen, for fear they should be carried off." Some witnesses remembered having in their youth made marvellous escapes; and Alexander Grigson, domestic at Aboyne Castle, had a story to tell, "that about twenty years ago, he and another boy were coming from the mill of Crathie, where they had been seeking their meat; and near to a birch wood, near to the Kirk of Crathy, three countrymen on horseback came up with them, but the deponent knew none of them; and they asked him and the other boy that was along with him, if they would go with them, and they would clothe them like gentlemen; but the deponent being elder than the other boy, made answer that they would not go along with them, for it struck the deponent in the head that perhaps he and the other boy were to be carried abroad, in respect a rumour prevailed in the country that young boys were carried abroad at that time." The men threatened force; and the boys, who could not fail then to have the blackest notions of their intentions, took to their heels while the kidnappers were tying their horses, and defied discovery in the recesses of the old forest of Mar, which, fortunately for them, skirted the road. This incident may have been a trick to frighten two country lads. Another, recorded by a chairman in Edinburgh, has a more business-like appearance. "In the year 1728 or 1729, he went to Aberdeen to see an uncle and an aunt, who lived there; and whilst he was there he was carried up to a house by a person whom he did not know, where he got a dram and a piece of biscuit, and was promised a new coat and great encouragement, if he would agree to go over to America with the other lads that were engaged to go there; that he signified his willingness to agree to the proposal; that upon this he was desired to go and come back to his breakfast again; but when he told this to some of the countrymen of his acquaintance, they told him that he was a fool, for he would be sold to the blacks, and they would eat him; that upon this he resolved immediately to leave the town, which he did." It appeared that those who endeavoured to recover their children were threatened with coercive measures; and the poor people seem to have been impressed with the conviction, that they were in the hands of an overwhelming power, with which it would be vain to contend. Thus one individual, having recovered possession of his son, met the captain of the transport vessel in the street, who bade him send back the youth, otherwise he might expect unpleasant consequences. Therefore he "promised and engaged to return his said son, which he accordingly did. Depones, that if he could have hindered his son from going to America he would have done it; and if he had known as much then as he does now, he would have done it. Depones, that before he promised to return his son to the said ship as above, he was himself threatened to be put into the Tolbooth." The line of defence adopted by the kidnappers was, that no one was forced, in the first instance; that each boy was the object of a distinct agreement, either with his parents or with himself; and the subsequent coercion employed towards them, which could
These admissions, that the "servants" required coercion; that they were confined in the public prison and other convenient places; and that they were sold, are of course, amply confirmed by the witnesses on the other side. A witness, William Jamieson, had a pathetic little history of his own to tell. He lived in the village of Old Meldrum, in the year 1740, and he had then a son John, between ten and eleven years old. One evening his boy did not come home; and in the course of his anxious inquiries, next day, about the missing youth, he was told by some neighbours, "that they saw a man, whom they said was a servant to John Burnet, late merchant in Aberdeen, who was commonly called Bonny John, with the deponent's said son, and two other boys, much about the same age, travelling towards Aberdeen, and that his son would be sent to the plantations." The kind of alarm that would be conveyed to the father's heart by such an intimation, may be imagined;
A very characteristic record of these transactions still remained in the books and accounts of the parties implicated. Among these documents, one of the witnesses, denominated "Walter Scott, writer to the signet," produces "the ship book," apparently the same which some of the witnesses more descriptively call "the kidnapping book." It is needless to say whose father it was who possessed this curious document. The investigation occurred in 1762—nine years before the birth of Sir Walter; and it was perhaps one of the last ideas that would have ever occurred to his respectable parent, that it was worth while communicating to his offspring any information from a mere merchant's account book, which had been placed in his hands in the usual routine of his business, and probably afterwards forgotten. Yet what a lively history might have been woven out of its dry materials, had it remained among the other lumber in George Square, to be rummaged out by the lame boy! Mr Scott was the agent for the kidnappers. It is satisfactory to observe that he appears to have been too honest an agent for their purposes; for we find that he transmitted to them this book by post, in order that it might be exhibited in the course of the arbitration, to which we shall hereafter allude; but his employers knew their own interest too well to produce it, until they were subsequently compelled to do so. The extracts from the books transferred to the papers before us, are of course those only which have some
And a more emphatical entry—
Listing appears to have been the slang, or, more properly speaking, the business term for kidnapping, and the price of the operation passes through a scale of sums, graduated probably to the difficulty of the task. Thus, while Williamson was procured for 1s. 6d., there is an entry "To a Serjeant for listing Mackie, 5s.;" while on the other hand, there is only "1s. 4½d. to Lighton and a soldier for listing Robert Paterson." There is one sweeping charge of a guinea, "to Maclean, sent to the country to list servants,"—amount of business done not stated, but it must have been considerable, as there are occasional entries of "cash sent to the country to Maclean." Sometimes sums are entered as paid to the parties themselves—as 5s. "to Margaret Robertson, when listed;" yet this can scarcely have been a voluntary operation on Margaret's part, as the immediate succeeding item is 1s. 6d. "to the wright on board and one of the boys for listing her." Five shillings are entered as "to two soldiers for listing Allardyce." He must have been a difficult boy to catch, as there is a further entry of 2s., as "cash they spent with him." This item introduces us to a dark feature in the expenditure of the kidnappers,—the sums that appear to have been spent by them in vicious indulgences to their young captives, to prevent the tedium of their imprisonment, from driving them to desperate efforts for their escape. We have thus,—"to the boys to play at cards, 1s.;" and in another place, "to the boys to drink, when put in the workhouse, 1s.; to six packs of cards to them, 9d." It is almost a relief in the perusal of these heartless business-like columns—every red line of which has the hard outline of premeditated cruelty—to read of 1s. 6d. being paid "to the piper for playing in the workhouse two days." But in the neighbourhood of this, there are some entries which we dare not copy. There is a candid explicitness about these accounts, which we must confess that we have not sufficient virtuous courage to imitate, by transferring to our columns some charges, of which we would yet fain give our readers an idea. The person who kept the books no doubt "called a spade a spade;" and, indeed, he bestowed on many other things their ordinary vulgar nomenclature. We tremble in approaching his most explicit declarations; we almost fear reproach in offering to the reader an extract of an item, in which he has been very decorous, considering the subject; but such an item! who shall explain its meaning? Here it is—"To Colonel Horsie for his concubine, £1!" Some entries referring to "the boys in the Tolbooth," or, more briefly, the prisoners," remind us, were this necessary, that these accounts related to persons kept in bondage. Other parts indicate the comprehensive nature of the business done in "the servant trade." Thus, on the 12th of May, there is a charge of 7s. 6d. "to three days' board of ten servants from the Tolbooth;" and on the same day, "to five days' board of thirty-four servants, £2, 2s. 6d." The latter number is frequently repeated in the account, and probably represents the stock of one considerable holder. It was estimated by the witnesses that sixty-nine were transported in one cargo in 1743; "and when," says a writer already alluded to, "it is considered that the trade was carried on to an equal extent for nearly six years, it is impossible to estimate the number of unhappy beings carried off at less than six hundred. We have endeavoured in our account of these transactions to be sternly and rigidly prosaic,—perhaps our readers may think we have no great merit in accomplishing such a resolution, but we also take merit for having adhered to the facts attested with impartial accuracy. To afford some relief to the plainness of our
So much for the first step,—the catching of the prey. 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. 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 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 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— 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 "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: 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 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:—
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 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 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. The subsequent career of Peter Williamson, though not all directly our present purpose, is so inviting that we cannot pass it over. He was one of those men who, with no settled purpose of life, have their brains perpetually spinning forth projects, and their hands perpetually putting them in operation. Wherever external circumstances placed him, there his internal nature predestined him turn the opportunities afforded him to the best account. We have seen him exercising the isolated energies of the self-sustaining savage in the wilderness; we shall now see him regulating the complex wheels of mutually dependent civilisation. One of his earliest projects was announced, in 1762, through a letter in the Edinburgh Courant. The drain of able-bodied men by the war had, he stated, prompted him to endeavour to discover some labour-saving machine, to facilitate the operations of the harvest; and he had at considerable expense invented an engine which would, "in the hands of a single man, do more execution in a field of oats in one day, and to better purpose, than it is in the power of six shearers to do. This machine," he continues, "is now completed, and is constructed in such a manner that, when the corn is tolerably thick, it will cut down near a sheaf at a stroke, and that without shaking the grain, or disordering the straw, besides laying down the corn as regularly as the most expert shearer can do." The machine possessed other qualifications far too numerous to be recapitulated here; and though the inventor protested that "neither vanity nor conceit," but the sole desire to serve the public, prompted him to expatiate on its merits, it is not absolutely necessary, at the present day, to join in all his anticipations of its wonderful influence on the amelioration of mankind. We are no authority on the abstruse practical subject of reaping-machines; but justice to our hero renders it right to say that his invention found a place in agricultural nomenclature, as "the basket-scythe."
We may here, perhaps, have traced to its invention the well-known toy called "Conversation-Cards," which has enlivened many a little Christmas party. If this be so, the debt of youth in general, to the poor kidnapped boy, is not small. In 1776 he started a weekly periodical called "The Scot's Spy, or Critical Observer," which appears to have been continued through the following year with the title of "The New Scot's Spy." In the mean time, he kept a tavern, over the door of which he advertised himself as "from the other world." It appears to have been for some time in the Parliament Square, and subsequently in the interior of the Parliament House itself, part of the wide area of which was partitioned into booths. Every now and then he was dropping before the public some invention great or small. Now it was a "new invented portable printing-press;" next, marking-ink for linen, "which stands washing, boiling, and bleaching, and is more regular and beautiful than any needle." But the chief monument of his energy was the establishment of a penny post-office for the city of Edinburgh, which he supported as a private speculation. It appears to have been soon after the year 1780 that he commenced this undertaking, and contemporaneously with it he published a Street Directory. One might suppose that the post-office, the directory, and the tavern, with an occasional invention or pamphlet, would form sufficient occupation, not only for one head, but one family. Williamson, however, must have all his fires full of irons; and so we find that his wife and daughter had to appear before the public as busy as himself in their own department. On the cover of his directory it is intimated, that "Mantua-making is carried on in all its branches as formerly," by "Mrs Williamson and daughter;" who, lest any means of exercising their craft should pass them, by reason either of its insignificance or its gravity, are made to state, that they "engraft silk, cotton, thread, and worsted stockings; make silk gloves, and every article in the engrafting branch, in the neatest manner, and on the most reasonable terms; likewise silk stockings washed in the most approved style; also grave-clothes made on the shortest notice." One would naturally imagine that all these professions of activity must have indicated a thrifty, industrious, moral, happy home. Alas, no! In 1789 Williamson was obliged to divorce his second wife, the mother of several children; and the revolting details of the inquiry show too plainly that the degraded woman pursued another profession besides those efforts of decent |