LAWLESSNESS AND CRIME.
In the summer of 1863, we were coming up the Texas Central Railroad,
from Houston to Hempstead, a distance of fifty miles. On reaching the
latter place we had stepped from the cars to the depot platform, and in
a minute heard a pistol-shot on the opposite side of the train. Thought
nothing strange of it till in a moment more some one remarked: "A man
is shot." And even then thought nothing unusual of it. The feeling of
terror was only a uniform matter of course. But stepping across the
way we observed a crowd gathering at an unoccupied store building,
went in and there saw a man on the counter, stretched at full length
on his back, struggling in his blood, and breathing heavily, with a
bullet-hole through his head and brains protruding. Near by him stood
his murderer, Dr. O----r, with _nonchalance_ and a smile of fiendish
satisfaction.
The dying man had been overseer on his murderer's plantation. A
difference had arisen between Mrs. O----r and the overseer about the
management of the plantation. And the lady, true to Southern instinct,
could not brook opposition from an overseer, so she writes herself
"insulted" to the doctor in the army, and home he comes in a rage by
the train we were on, and spying the unsuspecting offender through the
car-window, leaps out and shoots him down at sight and without warning.
No one looked strange or excited, or said a word. We walked back to
the train in disgust, feeling it may be our turn next. Went home to
B----m, twenty-five miles, and the next morning a friend of ours--a
druggist, Dr. F----g, from Paducah, Kentucky, at the opening of the
war--was assassinated in the public streets. The writer officiated at
his funeral from his widowed mother's house, who was thus robbed of
her only son and support in old age. The sheriff of Washington County
witnessed the transaction, and had foreknowledge of it, but did nothing
officially to prevent or punish the crime. The name of the assassin was
B----t, who, the writer learns, has since come to a similar end himself
in the State of Mississippi, thus illustrating the innate reflex, as it
were, of the law of retributive justice that sleeps not nor slumbers
till it has blood for blood, life for life! The murdered man's mother
and only sister are since deceased, hurried out of the world by the
great sorrow of his untimely and tragic end!
One night after the family had retired several pistol-shots were fired
back of our house, attended with boisterous talking. Dressing, we went
to the back window, and there saw a man in the moonlight falling to
the ground. Just then a voice at the front of the house called: "Mr.
N., Mr. N., come down here, I want to see you quick!" Descending the
outside stairway leading from the upper to the lower gallery, we met
our friend Captain C., who instantly exclaimed: "Mr. N., I have shot my
best friend all to pieces. Please go and look after him. I must leave.
You will find me at Dr. B.'s or about there." We went to the dying man,
and found several collected around him. He had two shots through the
knee and thigh, the latter cutting the big artery, and he bled to death
in a few minutes.
It was Mr. Smythe, whom we had met not three hours before in the
evening, and who then took occasion to protest his innocence from
having taken part, as we had been informed, in a little persecution
against the writer about the purchase of a lot of cotton. We noticed
he seemed somewhat excited, judging from his tone of voice in the
dark, and he on horseback in the street. While conversing he remarked
in a low defiant tone: "You know, Mr. N., that I am not afraid of
_any_ man!" Just then we heard the click of a pistol in his hands, and
instantly felt ourself in danger, and saying to him "it is all right,"
suddenly retreated to the house and did not go out again till called
out to look after his corpse.
It seems after we left him he fell in company with a drunken desperado,
and about eleven o'clock the latter came to the gate of our backyard,
on Smythe's horse, and called by name for one of the colored servants
to come out to him, and getting no response tore pickets from the fence
and hurled them against the door of the negro quarters. Soon Smythe
appeared and an altercation took place between them about the horse.
Our friend, Captain C., was passing to his home, and out of kindness
to the family sought to quell the disturbance. As he reached the spot
the desperado was drawing his revolver on Smythe, and when disarmed by
the Captain, then Smythe in turn drew a derringer on the desperado,
when the Captain caught it in his left hand, holding the revolver in
his right, and saying: "You shall not shoot a disarmed man." Smythe
responded: "Let go my pistol or I'll shoot _you_," accompanying the
threat with an oath. A struggle ensued in which Smythe recovered the
use of his pistol, and shot the Captain, grazing his hip. He replied
with two shots, which finished Smythe's career on earth. A preliminary
examination was had, and the Captain was bound over, but the grand jury
dismissed the case as justifiable homicide.
We will now relate an incident, with which the writer was still more
personally connected, to illustrate the bitter prejudices a Northern
man had to meet living in that country. Yes, prejudice! a thing
conceived in sin, born in iniquity, twin of jealousy, and equally
cruel; one of the relics of barbarism still clinging to poor human
nature, tormenting its waking hours and its dreams by night, lurking in
the soul's deep recesses, and in the thoughts of the brain, displaying
in its action all the bristling, snarling, growling, barking, and
snapping suspicion of the canine race, ready to pitch on every strange
dog passing the street. It may be further characterized as the
blindest, most unreasonable, hateful and hating, and most desperately
wicked passion of the human soul. It casts its blighting mildew over
everything it touches.
We can have no extensive acquaintance with its presence and power in
society until we have met and felt its chafing and friction-grinding
power in the strange relations and contacts of a selfish and suspicious
world. Our ideas and feelings are not sufficiently humanized and
catholic in their sway. And when we think they are, frequently on
occasion we are waked up to discover they are not. The thought is
unwelcome, that in this we exhibit still, in despite our genteel and
generous progress, the unconscious affinities of barbarism.
But why do we thus comment? Because in our five years' Texas experience
we met this monster of the human heart in shapes and phases, deeper,
darker, and more vile than we had ever dreamed of before, or could
have dreamed if we had never seen Texas. There this barbarous element
assumes a more lawless and criminal form than in any other country
we ever saw. There it hesitates not at doing personal violence to
its object. And so much the more as they value human life less than
other people. Comparatively, Northern people can scarcely imagine what
prejudice means except in milder forms, and as defined in dictionaries,
pulpit theories, and so forth.
A lady friend said to us on our return from that country: "Mr. N., you
ought to be a wiser man for what you have seen in Texas." A gentleman
was kind enough to say to us: "Served you right, you had no business to
go there in the first place." Now we do not of course ask the alms of
sympathy in our Texas experience, particularly from such as might feel
harmed by the exercise of that noble grace, but simply appear as the
writer of a little personal history.
Perhaps no Northern man was more unfortunately situated in Texas than
the writer. He had gone there just a few months prior to the war,
which, to the eye of prejudice, was evidence, _prima facie_, that he
was a spy, or something else inimical to the country's welfare. If not,
why was he there at that late day? The incident we wish to relate is in
the following.