A DESCENDANT OF THE CAVALIERS.
“Pride of race, pride in an ancestry of gentlemen, pride in all those
habitudes and instincts which separated us so immeasurably from the
peddling and swindling Yankee nation,—all this pride has been openly
cherished and avowed in all simplicity and good faith.”—_Richmond (Va.)
Enquirer._
Peek sat in the little closet which opened into Charlton’s office.
Suddenly he heard the crack of a pistol, followed by a volley of
ferocious oaths. Efforts seemed to be made to pacify the utterer, who
was with difficulty withheld by his companions from following the person
who had offended him. At these sounds Peek felt a cold, creeping
sensation down his back, and a tightness in his throat, as if it were
grasped by a hand. The pistol-shot and the nature of the oaths brought
before him the figure of the overseer with his broad-brimmed hat, his
whip, and his revolver.
All the negro’s senses were now concentrated in the one faculty of
hearing. He judged that five persons had entered the room. The angry man
had cooled down, and the voices were not raised above a whisper.
“Is he here?” asked one.
No answer was heard in reply. Probably a gesture had sufficed.
“Will he resist?”
“Possibly. These fugitives usually go armed.”
“What shall we do if he threatens to fire?”
Here an altercation ensued, during which Peek could understand little of
what was uttered. But he had heard enough. His thoughts first reverted
to his wife and his infant boy, and he pictured to himself their
destitute condition in the event of his being taken away. Then the
treachery of Charlton glared upon him in all its deformity, and he
instinctively drew from the sheath in an inside pocket of his vest a
sharp, glittering dagger-like knife. He looked rapidly around, but there
was nothing to suggest a mode of escape. The only window in the closet
was one over the door communicating with the office.
Suddenly it occurred to him that, if he were to be hemmed in in this
closet, his chances of escape would be small. It would be better for him
to be in the larger room, whether he chose to adopt a defensive or an
offensive policy. Seeing an old rope in a corner of the closet, he
seized it with the avidity a drowning man might show in grasping at a
straw.
He listened intently once more to the whisperers. A low susurration,
accompanied with a whistling sound, he identified at once as coming from
Skinner, the captain of the schooner in which he had made his escape.
Then some one sneezed. Peek would have recognized that sneeze in
Abyssinia. It must have proceeded from Colonel Delancy Hyde.
Standing on tiptoe on a coal-box, the negro now looked through a hole in
the green-paper curtain covering the glass over the door, and surveyed
the whole party. He found he was right in his conjectures. The captain
was there with one of his sailors,—an old inebriate by the name of
Biggs, both doubtless ready to swear to the slave’s identity. And the
Colonel was there as natural as when he appeared on the plantation,
strolling round to take a look at the “smart niggers,” so as to be able
to recognize them in case of need. Two policemen, armed with bludgeons,
and probably with revolvers; and Charlton, with a paper tied with red
tape in his hand, formed the other half of this agreeable company. Peek
marked well their positions, put his knife between his teeth, and
descended from the box.
Colonel Delancy Hyde is a personage of too much importance to be kept
waiting while we describe the movements of a slave. Colonel Delancy Hyde
must be attended to first. Tall, lank, and gaunt in figure,
round-shouldered and stooping, he carried his head very much after the
fashion of a bloodhound on the scent. Beard and moustache of a reddish,
sandy hue, coarse and wiry, concealed much of the lower part of a face
which would have been pale but for the floridity which bad whiskey had
imparted. The features were rather leonine than wolfish in outline (if
we may believe Mr. Livingstone, the lion is a less respectable beast
than the wolf). But the small brownish eyes, generally half closed and
obliquely glancing, had a haughty expression of penetration or of scorn,
as if the person on whom they fell would be too much honored by a full,
entire regard from those sublime orbs.
The Colonel wore a loosely fitting frock-coat and pantaloons, evidently
bought ready made. They were of a grayish nondescript material which he
used to boast was manufactured in Georgia. He generally carried his
hands in his pockets, and bestowed his tobacco-juice impartially on all
sides with the _abandon_ of a free and independent citizen who has not
been used to carpets.
There were two things of which Colonel Delancy Hyde was proud: one, his
name, the other, his Virginia birth. It is interesting to trace back the
genealogy of heroes; and we have it in our power to do this justice to
the Colonel.
In the year 1618 there resided in London a stable-keeper of doubtful
reputation, and connected with gentlemen of the turf who frequented Hyde
Park and Newmarket in the early days of that important British
institution, the horse-race. This man’s name was Hyde. He had a patron
in Sir Arthur Delancy, a dissipated nobleman, whom he admired, naming
after him a son who was early initiated in all the mysteries of
jockeyship and gambling.
Unfortunately for the youth, he did not have the wit to keep out of the
clutches of the law. Twice he was arrested and imprisoned for swindling.
A third offence of a graver character, consisting in the theft of a
pocket-book containing thirteen shillings, led to his arraignment for
grand larceny, a crime then punishable with death. The gallows began to
loom in the not remote distance with a sharpness of outline not
pictorially pleasant to the ambition of the Hyde family.
About that time the “London Company,” whose colony in Virginia was in a
languishing condition, petitioned the Crown to make them a present of
“vagabonds and condemned men” to be sent out to enforced labor. The
senior Hyde applied to Sir Arthur Delancy to save his namesake; and that
nobleman laid the case before his friend, Sir Edward Sandys, treasurer
of the company aforesaid. By their joint influence the Hydes were spared
the disgrace of seeing their eldest hung; and King James having
graciously granted the London Company’s petition for a consignment of
“vagabonds and condemned men,” a hundred were sent out (a mere fraction
of the numbers of similar gentry who had preceded them), and of this
precious lot the younger Hyde made one.[12] Just a year afterwards,
namely, in 1620, a Dutch trading-vessel anchored in James River with
twenty negroes, and this was the beginning of African slavery in North
America.
Neither threats nor lashes could induce young Mr. Hyde, this “founder of
one of the first families,” to work. Soon after his arrival on the banks
of the Chickahominy he stole a gun, and thenceforth got a precarious
living by shooting, fishing, and pilfering. He took to himself a female
partner, and faithfully transmitted to his descendants the traits by
which he was distinguished.
Not one of them, except now and then a female of the stock, was ever
known to get an honest living; and even if the poor creatures had
desired to do so, the state of society where their lot was cast was such
as to deter them from learning any mechanical craft or working
methodically at any manual employment.
Slavery had thrown its ban and its slime over white labor, branding it
with disrepute. To get bread, not by the sweat of your own brow, but by
somebody else’s sweat, became the one test of manhood and high spirit.
To be a gentleman, you must begin with robbery.
The Hydes were hardly an educated race. There was a tradition in the
family that one of them had been to school, but if he had, the fruits of
culture did not appear. They seemed to have shared the benediction of
Sir William Berkeley, once Governor of Virginia, who wrote: “I thank God
there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have
them these hundred years.”
It is true that our Colonel Delancy Hyde could read and write, although
indifferently. The labor of acquiring this ability had been enormous and
repugnant; but before his eighteenth year he had achieved it; and
thenceforth he was a prodigy in the eyes of the rest of his kin. He got
his title of Colonel from once receiving a letter so addressed from
Senator Mason, who had employed him to buy a horse. Among the Colonel’s
acquaintances who could read, this brevet was considered authoritative
and sufficient.
Not being of a thrifty and forehanded habit, the Colonel’s father never
rose to the possession of more than three slaves at a time; but he made
up for his deficiency in this respect by beating these three all the
more frequently. They were a miserable set, and, to tell the truth,
deserved many of the whippings they got. The owner was out of pocket by
them, year after year, but was too shiftless a manager to provide
against the loss, and was too proud to get rid of the encumbrances
altogether. He and his children and his neighbors were kept poor,
squalid, and degraded by a system that in effect made them the serfs of
a few rich proprietors, who, by discrediting white labor, were able to
buy up at a trifling cost the available lands, and then impoverish them
by the exhausting crops wrung from the generous soil by large gangs of
slaves under the rule of superior capital and intelligence.
And yet no lord of a thousand “niggers” could be a more bigoted upholder
than the Hydes of “our institutions, sir.” (Living by jugglery, Slavery
usually speaks of _the_ institution as our _institutions_.) They would
foam at the mouth in speaking of those men of the North who dared to
question the divinity and immutability of slavery. To deny its right to
unlimited extension was the one kind of profanity not to be pardoned. It
was worse than atheism to say that slavery was sectional and freedom
national.
To the Colonel’s not very clear geographical conceptions the white
Americans south of Mason and Dixon’s line were, with hardly an
exception, descendants of noblemen and gentlemen; while all north were,
to borrow the words of Mr. Jefferson Davis, either the “scum of Europe”
or “a people whose ancestors Cromwell had gathered from the bogs and
fens of Ireland and Scotland.”[13]
Colonel Delancy Hyde revelled in those genealogical invectives of a
similar tenor by a Richmond editor, whose fatuous and frantic iterations
that the Yankees were the descendants of low-born peasants and
blackguards, while the Southern Americans are the progeny of the English
cavaliers, betrayed a ludicrous desire to strengthen his own feeble
belief in the asseveration by loud and incessant clamor; for he had
faith in Sala’s witty saying, that, if a man has strong lungs, and will
keep bawling day after day that he is a genius or a gentleman, the
public will at last believe him.
The Colonel never tired of denouncing the Puritans:—“A canting,
hyppercritical set of cusses, sir; but they had some little fight in
’em, though they couldn’t stahnd up agin the caval’yers,—no sir-r-r!—the
caval’yers gev ’em particular hell; but the Yankee spawn of these
cusses,—they hev lost the little pluck the Puritans wonst had, and air
cowards, every mother’s son on ’em. One high-tone Southern gemmleman—one
descendant of the caval’yers—can clare out any five on ’em in a fair
fight.”
By a fair fight for a descendant of the cavaliers, the Colonel meant one
of two things: either a six-barrelled revolver against an unarmed
antagonist, or an ambush in which the aforesaid descendant could hit,
but be secure against being hit in return. One of the Colonel’s maxims
was, “Never fire unless you can take your man at a disadvantage.”
His sire having been unluckily cast in a petty lawsuit, “by a low-born
Yankee judge, sir,” Colonel Delancy Hyde drifted off to the Southwest,
and gradually emerged into the special vocation for which the
unfortunate habits of life, which the Southern system had driven him to,
seemed to qualify him. He became a sort of agent for the recovery of
runaway slaves, and in this capacity had the freedom of the different
plantations, and was frequently applied to for help by bereaved masters.
Every man is said to have his specialty: the Colonel had at last found
_his_.
In the survey which Peculiar took of the assemblage in Charlton’s
office, he saw that Charlton himself was separated from the rest in
being behind a small semicircular counter, an old piece of furniture,
bought cheap at a street auction. By getting in the lawyer’s place the
negro would have a sort of barrier, protecting him in front and on two
sides against his assailants. Behind him would be the stove.
Stealthily throwing open the closet-door he glided out, and before any
one could intercept him, he had fastened Charlton’s arms in a noose, and
was standing over him with upraised knife. So rapid, so sudden, so
unexpected had been the movement, that it was all completed before even
an exclamation was uttered. The first one to break the silence was
Charlton, who in a paroxysm of terror cried out, “Mercy! Save me,
officers! save me!”
Iverson, one of the policemen, started forward and drew a revolver; but
Peek made a shield of the body of the lawyer, who now found himself
threatened with a pistol on one side and a knife on the other, much to
his mortal dismay.
“Put down your pistol, Iverson!” he stammered. “Don’t attempt to do
anything, any of you. This g-g-gentleman doesn’t mean to do any harm. He
will listen to reason. The gentleman will listen to reason.”
“Gentleman be damned!” exclaimed Colonel Delancy Hyde. “Officer, put
down your pistol. This piece of property mustn’t be damaged. I’m
responsible for it. Peek, you imperdent black cuss, drop that
rib-tickler,—drop it right smart, or yer’ll ketch hell.”
The Colonel advanced, and Peek brought down his knife so as to inflict
on Charlton’s shoulder a gentle puncture, which drew from him a cry of
pain, followed by the exclamation, in trembling tones: “Keep off, keep
off, Colonel! Peek doesn’t mean any harm.”
Iverson made an attempt to get in the negro’s rear, but a shriek of
remonstrance from Charlton drove the officer back.
Finding now that he was master of the situation, Peek let his right arm
fall gradually to his side, and, still holding Charlton in his grasp,
said: “Gentlemen, there are just five chairs before you. Be seated, and
hear what I have to say.”
The company looked hesitatingly at one another, till Blake, one of the
policemen, said, “Why not?” and took a seat. The rest followed his
example.
And then Peek, crowding back the rage and anguish of his heart, spoke as
follows: “My name is Peculiar Institution. I came to this lawyer some
seven weeks ago for advice. I paid him money. He got me to tell him my
story. He pretended to be my friend; but thinking he could make a few
dollars more out of the slaveholder than he could out of me, he sends on
word to the man who calls himself my master;—in short, betrays me. You
see I have him in my power. What would you do with him if you were in my
place?”
“I’d cut off his dirty ears!” exclaimed Blake, carried beyond all the
discretion of a policeman by his indignation.
“What do you say, Colonel Hyde?” asked Peek.
“Wall, Peek, I don’t car’ what yer do ter him, providin’ yer’ don’t
damage yerself; but I reckon yer’d better drop that knife dam quick, and
give in. It’s no use tryin’ to git off. We’ve three witnesses here to
swar you’re the right man. The Yankees put through the Fugitive Law
right smart now. Yer stand no chance.”
“That’s all true, Colonel,” replied Peek, speaking as if arguing aloud
to himself. “The law was executed in Boston last week, where there
wasn’t half the proof you have. To do it they had to call out the whole
police force, but they _did_ it; and if such things are done in Boston,
we can’t expect much better in New York. But you see, Colonel, with this
knife in my hand, I can now do one of two things: I can either kill this
man, or kill myself. In either case you lose. The law hangs me if I kill
him, and if I kill myself the sexton puts all of me he can lay hold of
under the ground. Now, Colonel, if you refuse my terms, I’m fully
resolved to do one of these two things,—probably the first, for I have
scruples about the second.”
“The cussed nigger talks as ef he was readin’ from a book!” exclaimed
Hyde, in astonishment. “Wall, Peek, what tairms do yer mean?”
“You must promise that, on my letting this man go, you’ll allow me to
walk freely out of this room, and go where I please unattended, on
condition that I’ll return at five o’clock this afternoon and deliver
myself up to you to go South with you of my own accord, without any
trial or bother of any kind.”
The Colonel gave a furtive wink at the policeman Iverson, and replied:
“Wall, Peek, that’s no more nor fair, seein’ as you’re sich a smart
respectible nigger. But I reckon yer’ll go and stir up the cussed
abolitioners.”
“I’ll promise,” returned Peek, “not to tell any one what’s going on.”
Hyde whispered in Iverson’s ear, and the latter nodded assent.
“Wall, Peek,” said Colonel Hyde, “if yer’ll swar, so help yer Gawd,
yer’ll do as yer say, we’ll let yer go.”
“Please write down my words, sir,” said Peek, addressing Blake.
The policeman took pen and paper, and wrote, after Peek’s dictation, as
follows:—
“We the undersigned swear, on our part, so help us God, we will allow
Peculiar Institution to quit this room free and unfollowed, on his
promise that he will return and give himself up at five o’clock this P.
M. And I, Peculiar Institution, swear, on my part, so help me God, I
will, if these terms are carried out, fulfil the above-named promise.”
“Sign that, you five gentlemen, and then I’ll sign,” said Peek.
The five signed. The paper and pen were then handed to Peek, and he
added his name in a good legible hand, and gave the paper to Blake.
Having done this, he pulled the rope from Charlton’s arms, and threw it
on the floor, then returned his knife to the sheath, and picked up his
cap.
But as he started for the door, Colonel Hyde drew his revolver, stood in
his way, and said: “Now, nigger, no more damn nonsense! Did yer think
Delancy Hyde was such a simple cuss as to trust yer? Officers, seize
this nigger.”
Iverson stepped forward to obey, but Blake, with the assured gesture of
one whose superiority has been felt and admitted, motioned him aside,
and said to Hyde, “I’ll take your revolver.”
The Colonel, either thrown off his guard by Blake’s cool air of
authority, or supposing he wanted the weapon for the purpose of
overawing the negro, gave it up. Blake then walked to the door, threw it
open, and said: “Peculiar Institution, I fulfil my part of the contract.
Now go and fulfil yours; and see you don’t come the lawyer over me by
breaking your word.”
Before Colonel Delancy Hyde could recover from the amazement and wrath
into which he was put by this act, Peculiar had disappeared from the
room, and Blake, closing the door after him, had locked it, and taken
out the key and thrust it in his pocket.
“May I be shot,” exclaimed the Colonel, “but this is the damdest mean
Yankee swindle I ever had put on me yit,—damned if it ain’t! Here I’ve
been to a hunderd dollars expense to git back that ar nigger, and now
I’m tricked out of my property by the very man I hired to help me git
it. This is Yankee all through,—damned if it ain’t!”
Charlton, still pale and trembling from his recent shock, had yet
strength to put in these words: “I must say, Mr. Blake, your conduct has
been unprofessional and unhandsome. There isn’t another officer in the
whole corps that would have committed such a blunder. I shall report you
to your superiors.”
Blake shook his finger at him, and replied, “Open your lips again, you
beggarly hound, and I’ll slap your face.”
Charlton collapsed into silence. Blake took a chair and said, “Amuse
yourselves five minutes, gentlemen, and then I’ll open the door.”
“A hell of a feller fur an officer!” muttered the Colonel. “To let the
nigger slide in that ar way, afore I’d ever a chance to take from him
his money and watch, which in course owt to go to payin’ my expenses.
Cuss me if I—”
“Silence!” exclaimed Blake in a voice of thunder.
Cowed by the force of a reckless and impulsive will, all present now
kept quiet. Colonel Hyde, who, deprived of his revolver, felt his
imbecility keenly, went to the window and looked out. Iverson, who was a
coward, tried to smile, and then, seeing the expression on Blake’s face,
looked suddenly grave. Captain Skinner gave way to melancholy
forebodings. His companion, Biggs, refreshed himself with a quid of
tobacco, and stood straddling and bracing himself on his feet as if he
thought a storm was brewing, and expected a lurch to leeward to take him
off his legs. As for Charlton, he drew a slip of paper toward him, and
appeared to be carelessly figuring on it; although, when he thought
Blake was not looking, his manner changed to an eager and anxious
consideration of the matter before him.
The five minutes had nearly expired when Blake rose, turned his back to
Charlton, and seemed to be lost in reverie. Charlton took this
opportunity to hastily finish what he had been writing. He then enclosed
it in an envelope, and directed it. This done, he motioned to Iverson,
and held up the letter. The latter nodded, and pointed with a motion of
the thumb to a newspaper on the table. Charlton placed the letter under
it, coughed, and turned to warm himself at the stove. Iverson sidled
toward the newspaper, but before he could reach it, Blake turned and
dashed his fist on it, took up the letter, and whispered menacingly to
Charlton, “Utter a single word, and I’ll choke you.”
Then unlocking and opening the door, he said to the other persons in the
room, “Go! you can return, if you choose, at five o’clock.”
“Give me my revolver,” demanded the Colonel.
“Say two words, and I’ll have you arrested for trying to shoot an
unarmed man,” replied Blake.
The Colonel swallowed his rage and left the room, followed by Iverson
and the two witnesses. Blake again locked the door and took the key.
“What’s the meaning of all this?” asked Charlton, seriously alarmed.
“It means that if you open that traitor’s mouth of yours till I tell you
to, you’ll come to grief.”
Charlton subsided and was silent.
Blake unfolded the paper he had seized, and read as follows: “You will
probably find Peek, either at Bunker’s in Broadway, or at his rooms in
Greenwich Street, the side nearest the river, third or fourth house from
the corner of Dey Street.”
Blake thrust the paper back into his pocket, and, wholly regardless of
Charlton’s presence, began pacing the floor.