were passing through
anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon
the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old
rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the
very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been
undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from
our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live,
has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation
dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we
have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but
reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is
springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it
may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past
of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton
Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat
and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one
inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the
negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and
may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.

[Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off
Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.]

Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in
this wise, retrospectively.

Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters,
to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a
thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and
not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the
parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,--had occasion to visit
that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson.
The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or
the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially
improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred
on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved
by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of
black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by
the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century,
festers within the crazy and tumble-down te