University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

The pretty little settlement of Orangeburg, in South Carolina,
was an old and flourishing establishment before the Revolution.
It was settled, as well as the contiguous country, by successive
troops of German Palatines, who brought with them all the sober
industry, and regular perseverance, characteristic of their country.
They carried the cultivation of indigo in Carolina to a degree
of perfection, on which they prospered, thriving, without
much state, and growing great in wealth, without provoking the attention
of their neighbours to the fact. To this day their descendants
maintain some of these characteristics, and, in a time
of much cry and little wool, when it is no longer matter of mortification
for a vain people to confess a want of money, they are
said to respond to the “I O U,” of their more needy acquaintance,
by knocking the head out of a flour barrel, and unveiling a
world of specie, which would renovate the credit of many a
mammoth bank. The good old people, their ancestors, were
thrifty in other respects; clean and comfortable in their houses;
raising abundance of pigs and poultry; rich in numerous children,
whom they reared up in good works and godliness, with
quite as much concern, to say no more, as they addressed to
worldly objects. They lived well—knew what surprising moral
benefits accure from a due attention to creature comforts; and,
if they spent little money upon foreign luxuries, it was only because
they had learned to domesticate so many of their own.

Home, indeed, was emphatically their world, and they found a
world in it. Frank hospitality, and the simple sorts of merriment
which delight, without impairing the unsophisticated nature,
were enjoyed among them in full perfection; and, from Four
Holes to Poplar Springs, they were emphatically one and the
same, and a very happy people.

Our present business lies in this region, at a period which we
may state in round numbers, as just five years before the Revolution.
The ferment of that event, as we all know, had even then
begun—the dispute and the debate, and the partial preparation—
but the details and the angry feeling had been slow in reaching
our quiet farmers along the Upper Edisto. The people were not
good English scholars, preserving, as they did in many places,
the integrity of the unbroken German. Here and there, it had
suffered an English cross, and, in other places, particularly in the
village, the English began to assert the ascendancy. But of
newspapers they saw nothing, unless it were the venerable South
Carolina Gazette, which did little more than tell them of the
births, marriages and deaths in the royal family, and, at melancholy
intervals, of the arrival in Charleston of some broad-bottomed
lugger from Bremen, or other kindred ports in Faderland.
The events which furnished materials to the village publican and
politician, were of a sort not to extend their influence beyond
their own ten-mile horizon. Their world was very much around
them, and their most foreign thoughts and fancies still had a
savour of each man's stable-yard. They never interfered in the
slightest degree with the concerns of Russia or Constantinople, and
I verily believe that if they had happened to have heard that
the Great Mogul were on his last legs, and knew the secret of
his cure, they would have hesitated so long before advising him
of its nature, that the remedy would come too late to be of any
service. And this, understand me, not because of any lack of
Christian bowels, but simply because of a native modesty, which
made them reluctant to meddle with any matters which did not
obviously and immediately concern themselves. They were,
certainly, sadly deficient in that spirit of modern philanthropy
which seems disposed to meddle with nothing else. Their hopes
and fears, strifes and excitements, were all local. At worst a

village scandal, or farm-yard jealousy—a squabble between two
neighbours touching a boundary line, or cattle pound, which ended
in an arbitration and a feast, in which cherry and domestic
grape—by no means the simple juice of either—did the duty of
peacemakers, and were thrice blessed accordingly. Sometimes
—a more serious matter—the tall lad of one household would fail
to make the proper impression upon the laughing damsel of another,
and this would produce a temporary family estrangement,
until Time, that great consoler, would furnish to the injured
heart of the sufferer, that sovereignest of all emollients—indifference!
Beyond such as these, which are of occurrence in the
best regulated and least sophisticated of all communities, there
were precious few troubles among our people of the North Edisto,
which they could not easily overcome.

But the affair which I am about to relate, was an exception to
the uniform harmlessness and simplicity of events among them,
and the better to make the reader understand it, I must take him
with me this pleasant October evening, to a snug farm-house in
the Forks of Edisto—a part of the country thus distinguished, as
it lies in the crotch formed by the gradual approach of the two
branches of Edisto river, a few miles above the spot of their final
junction. Our farmer's name is Cole. He is not rich, but not
poor—one of those substantial, comfortable men of the world,
who has just enough to know what to do with it, and just
little enough to fancy that if he could get more he should
know what to do with that also. His farm, consisting of five or
six hundred acres, is a competence, but a small part of which is
cleared and in cultivation. He has but two slaves, but he has
two strapping sons, one of twelve, the other of fourteen, who
work with the slaves, and upon whom, equally with them, he bestows
the horse-whip when needed, with as bountiful a hand as
he bestows the hommony. But if he counts but precious little
of gold and silver among his treasures, he has some treasures
which, in those days of simplicity, were considered by many to
be much more precious than any gold or silver. Like Jephthah,
Judge of Israel, he has a daughter—nay, for that matter, he has
two of them, and one of them, the eldest, is to be married this
very evening. Philip Cole was no Judge of Israel, but he loved

his daughters not the less, and the whole country justified his
love. The eyes of the lads brightened, and their mouths watered
at the bare mention of their names, and the sight of them generally
produced such a commotion in the hearts of the surrounding
swains, that, as I have heard averred a hundred times by
tradition, they could, on such occasions, scarcely keep their feet.
Keep their feet they could not, on such nights as the present,
when they were not only permitted to see the lasses, but to dance
it with them merrily. Dorothy Cole, the eldest, was as fine a specimen
of feminine mortality, as ever blossomed in the eyes of
love; rather plumpish, but so well made, so complete, so brightly
eyed, and so rosily cheeked, that he must be a cold critic indeed,
who should stop to look for flaws—to say, here something might
be pared off, and here something might be added. Such fine
women were never made for such foolish persons. But Margaret,
the younger, a girl of sixteen, was unexceptionable. She was
her sister in miniature. She was beautiful, and faultless in her
beauty, and so graceful, so playful, so pleasantly arch, and tenderly
mischievous—so delightful, in short, in all her ways, that
in looking upon her you ceased to remember that Eve had fallen
—you still thought of her in Eden, the queen of its world of
flowers, as innocent and beautiful as the very last budding rose
amongst them. At all events, this was the opinion of every body
for ten miles round, from Frank Leichenstein, the foreign gentleman—a
German on his travels—to Barnacle Sam, otherwise
Samuel Moore, a plain raftsman of the Edisto.

The occasion, though one of gaiety, which brought the company
together, was also one of gloom. On this night the fair
Dorothy would cease to be a belle. All hopes, of all but one,
were cut off by her lately expressed preference for a farmer
from a neighbouring district, and the young men assembled to
witness nuptials which many of them looked on with envy and
regret. But they bore, as well as they might, with the mortification
which they felt. Love does not often kill in modern
periods, and some little extra phlegm may be allowed to a community
with an origin such as ours. The first ebullitions of public
dissatisfaction had pretty well worn off before the night of the
wedding, and, if the beauty of the bride, when she stood up that

night to receive the fatal ring, served to reawaken the ancient
flame in the breasts of any present, its violence was duly overcome
in the reflection that the event was now beyond recall, and
regrets utterly unavailing. The frolic which succeeded, the
good cheer, the uproar, and the presence of numerous other
damsels, all in their best, helped in no small degree to lessen the
discontent and displeasure of the disappointed. Besides, there
was the remaining sister, Margaret, a host in herself, and so gay,
and so good-natured, so ready to dance and sing, and so successful
in the invention of new modes of passing time merrily, that,
before the bride disappeared for the night, she was half chagrined
to discover that nobody—unless her new-made husband—now
looked to where she stood. Her sway was at an end with the
hopes of her host of lovers.