Zoë, or The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume II)

Zoë, Or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume II)

Truman and Spofford (Cincinnati)
1855
323 pages

Mrs. Elizabeth D. Livermore

With Illustrations Henri Lovie, and Charles Bauerle

“God has bid away the human soul in the black man’s skin and his darker person, that in finding it, we may re-discover our alienated and forgotten nature; and rejoice more over the one that was lost, than the ninety and nine who went not astray.”—Belllows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.— Santa Cruz
CHAP. II— Emancipation
CHAP.III— The Retrospect
CHAP. IV.— Zoë’s Greeting to the Tropics
CHAP. V.— Mingling op the Old and the New
CHAP. VI.— Young America expatiates
CHAP. VII.— Zoe opens her Mission
CHAP. VIII.— Young America is heretical on Art
CHAP. IX.— The Queens op the Queen City
CHAP. X.—Diamond cut Diamond
CHAP. XI—The Shipwreck
CHAP. XII.—”Books in Brooks.”
CHAP. XIII— Mrs. Pumpkin’s Tract for the Times
CHAP. XIV.— The Quarrel and its Denouement
CHAP. XV.— Young America makes a Declaration, not of Independence
CHAP. XVI.—The War-horse Eagle
CHAP. XVII—Home, with its Shadows
CHAP. XVIII.—The Wormwood and the Gall
CHAP. XIX.— The Hurricane
CHAP. XX.— Light after Darkness
CHAP. XXI.— A Voice from Amazona
CHAP. XXII.—The Church Recusant
CHAP. XXIII.— Letters and Reminiscences
CHAP. XXIV.—The Closing Triumph

We must now return to Santa Cruz and give a hasty sketch of the fortunes of George Carlan and his wife, during the twelve years absence of their daughter in Denmark.

It will be recollected that the former, in emerging from slavery, had placed before himself two objects for which to live and labor—wealth, and independence; or as it may be expressed in one phrase, independence through wealth. Towards these his aims were directed and his ambitious hopes constantly aspiring.

Sophia, on the contrary, affectionate and retiring, as she was, shared but in a slight degree her husband’s restless wishes; and if ever her thoughts were turned towards his favorite goal, and her imagination excited by his visions of distant good attained through these means, it was that he and her child, more than herself, might win the happiness which would accrue from their possession.

Mr. Carlan’s industry and enterprise had been crowned with success so far as to place them in comfortable circumstances.   Indeed, in comparison with most of his tribe, he was wealthy and was regarded with consideration by his own caste. But his affluence gave him no honorable position among the white Creoles of the island. To-be-sure, he had business relations with them, and the Danish officials treated him with a half friendly, half condescending familiarity, which was anything but agreeable. But by the English residents he was looked upon with distrust and aversion as an ambitious, discontented man, who was to be avoided and scorned on every possible occasion to prevent his impertinent encroachments upon their dignity and aristocratic rights. As these latter saw their power and influence decline in the island just in proportion to the losses and poverty incurred by their miserable management of their property, spendthrift habits, and ruinous absenteeism, so in the same ratio did they hate the Irish emigrants into whose hands their estates had fallen, or the colored people who, through their enterprise, were seizing upon their commerce and manufactures.

Had George Carlan, when he emerged from slavery, possessed a true idea of the value of freedom in its relations to the training and development of the human soul above all things else, he would have been saved much bitterness of feeling and many heartaches, and in the end have prospered much better also in his worldly affairs. For by this principle deeply-rooted and acting vitally upon his daily life, he would have gained a self-possession equal to every emergency, an insight into the laws of commercial intercourse, and proper appreciation of the forces of nature, and the due balance to be preserved between the consumption of the products in which he dealt and the law of their supply, quite indispensable to success in any business department. This, too, would have given him that patient reliance on Providence in untoward seasons, and that geniality and kindness of demeanor in his social and business relations, which are better than a capital of thousands to one who launches forth on the sea of commercial life. But these ideas he had had no opportunity of learning in slavery, and it was not to be expected that he would begin his career as a merchant under better auspices, in these respects, than multitudes, who commence life with none of his disadvantages. Still he had much skill, shrewdness, and industry, and for several years his success was without a drawback, and, as was remarked in the commencement of this story, he was enabled to surround himself and family with not only the comforts, but many of the luxuries of life…

Read Volume II here.

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