THE DEATH SHOT

CHAPTER ONE.

TWO SORTS OF SLAVE-OWNERS.

In the old slave-owning times of the United States--happily now no
more--there was much grievance to humanity; proud oppression upon the
one side, with sad suffering on the other. It may be true, that the
majority of the slave proprietors were humane men; that some of them
were even philanthropic in their way, and inclined towards giving to the
unholy institution a colour of _patriarchism_. This idea--delusive, as
intended to delude--is old as slavery itself; at the same time, modern
as Mormonism, where it has had its latest, and coarsest illustration.

Though it cannot be denied, that slavery in the States was,
comparatively, of a mild type, neither can it be questioned, that among
American masters occurred cases of lamentable harshness--even to
inhumanity. There were slave-owners who were kind, and slave-owners who
were cruel.

Not far from the town of Natchez, in the State of Mississippi, lived two
planters, whose lives illustrated the extremes of these distinct moral
types. Though their estates lay contiguous, their characters were as
opposite, as could well be conceived in the scale of manhood and
morality. Colonel Archibald Armstrong--a true Southerner of the old
Virginian aristocracy, who had entered the Mississippi Valley before the
Choctaw Indians evacuated it--was a model of the kind slave-master;
while Ephraim Darke--a Massachusetts man, who had moved thither at a
much later period--was as fair a specimen of the cruel. Coming from New
England, of the purest stock of the Puritans--a people whose descendants
have made much sacrifice in the cause of negro emancipation--this about
Darke may seem strange. It is, notwithstanding, a common tale; one
which no traveller through the Southern States can help hearing. For
the Southerner will not fail to tell him, that the hardest task-master
to the slave is either one, who has been himself a slave, or descended
from the Pilgrim Fathers, whose feet first touched American soil by the
side of Plymouth Rock!