It seems that the natural impressions made upon this man in this beautiful country were of an earthly and sordid character, for he has always exhibited, in his wanderings in pursuit of fortune, the reckless and degraded soul of a mercenary.
Seeking gain in the New World, he turned up in the Slave States when the revolt was determined upon, and without reluctance, offered his services to the frantic and savage horde. Although a Swiss and republican by birth and inheritance, he does not hesitate between liberty and despotism. The principles of political dogmas do not agitate him; it is the desire for money, and an insatiate thirst for blood, blasting the natural heart with cruel and remorseless passions, that led him blindly and swiftly to ruin. The fatal plunge taken, and there was no return. The compunctions of humanity passed over his seared and unfeeling conscience, with no more effect than when the waves surge over the huge rocks which form the bed of the deepest ocean.
He was selected for the fatal position by the brutal Winder, who first observed him among the unfortunate prisoners of the first disastrous battle of the republic. What should recommend him, then, to the notice of this inhuman officer, can be easily conjectured by the survivors of the prisons of that period. Cruelty then was pastime, it afterwards became a law. It was then that some of the chivalry, after the manner of the tribes of Abyssinia and Eastern Africa, made glorious trophies of the skulls and the bones of their antagonists who had fallen in battle.
This man appeared at times kind and humane, and his voice had the accents of benevolence; but when excited, natural sentiments recoiled with horror at the depth and extent of his imprecations. This assumed gentleness of disposition is of but little weight among the examples of history.
“I have often said,” writes Montaigne, “that cowardice is the mother of cruelty, and by experience have observed that the spite and asperity of malicious and inhuman courage are accompanied with the mantle of feminine softness.” The ensanguined Sylla wept over the recital of the miseries he himself had caused.
That daily murderer, the tyrant of Pheres, forbade the play of tragedy, lest the citizens should weep over the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache.
The beautiful eyes of the Roman maidens glistened with tears at the imaginary sufferings of the inanimate marbles of Niobe and Laocoon, yet how remorselessly they gave the signal of death to the defeated gladiator on the arena of the Colosseum!
The warm, generous, natural impulses of the heart soon become affected, impaired, and even reversed by brutal associations.
Circumstances develop greatly the characters of men, and they sometimes rise to true greatness, or sink into baseness, according to the law of effect, of contact, and example.