“Nothing of moment,” she replied. “Two men called to get names for a Directory.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That if they wanted my husband’s name, they must get it from him personally.”
“You did well. Were they polite?”
“Very, and seemed to seek excuses for lingering; but, getting no encouragement, they left.”
Could it be they were spies? The question occurred to me, but I soon dismissed it as improbable.
And yet they were creatures employed by Carberry Ratcliff to find out what they could about the man who had offended him.
Ratcliff was the type of a class that spring from slavery as naturally as certain weeds spring from a certain quality of manure. He was such a man as only slavery could engender. The son of a South Carolina planter, he was bred to believe that his little State—little in respect to its white population—was yet the master State of the Union, and that his family was the master family of the State. The conclusion that he was the master man of his family, and consequently of the Union, was not distant or illogical. As soon as he could lift a pistol he was taught to fire at a mark, and to make believe it was an Abolitionist. Before he was twelve years old he had fired at and wounded a free negro, who had playfully answered an imperious order by mimicking the boy’s strut. Of this achievement the father was rather proud.
Accustomed to regard the lives and persons of slaves as subject to his irresponsible will, or to the caprices of his untrained and impure passions, he soon transferred to the laboring white man and woman the contempt he felt for the negro. We cannot have the moral sense impaired in one direction without having it warped and corrupted throughout.
Wrong feeling must, by an inexorable law, breed wrong thinking. And so Ratcliff looked upon all persons, whether white or black, who had to earn their bread by manual labor, as (in the memorable words of his friend Mr. Hammond, United States Senator from South Carolina) “Mudsills and slaves.” For the thrifty Yankee his contempt was supreme, bitter, almost frantic.