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.