Dorothy South: A Love Story of Virginia Just Before the War

by George Cary Eggleston

He thus set himself two tasks, one of which he might perhaps fulfil by hard work and discreet management. The other promised to be greatly more difficult. He made a very bad beginning at it by sitting up late at night to read and ponder Dorothy’s letters, to question them as to the future, to study every indication of character or impulse, or temporary mood of mind they might give.

With the debt-paying problem he got on much better. He had now a whole year’s accumulated income from his annuity, and he devoted all of it at once to the lightening of this burden. He studied markets as if they had been problems in physics, and guided himself in his planting by the results of these studies. He had sold apples and bacon and sweet potatoes the year before, as we know, with results that encouraged him to go further in the direction of “Yankee farming.” This year he planted large areas in watermelons and other large areas in other edible things that the people of the cities want, but which no south side Virginia planter had ever thought of growing for sale.

He was laughed at while doing all this, and envied when the results of it appeared.

He deliberately implicated Dorothy in these his misdeeds, also, doing on her plantation precisely as he did on his own, so that when late in the autumn he gave account of his stewardship he was able to inform the court, to its astonishment and to that of the entire community, that he had discharged every dollar of debt that had rested upon his ward’s estate. The judge applauded such management of a trust estate, and Arthur Brent’s neighbors wondered. Some of them saw in his success ground of approval of “Yankee farming”; all of them conceived a new respect for the ability of a man who had thus, in so brief a time, freed two old estates from the hereditary debts that had been accumulating for slow generations.

Arthur had been additionally spurred and stimulated to the accomplishment of this end, by the forebodings of evil in connection with national politics which had gravely haunted him throughout the year.

In May the Republican party had nominated Mr. Lincoln, and about the same time the Democrats made his election a practical certainty. There was clearly a heavy majority of the people opposed to his election, but the division of that opposition into three hostile camps with three rival candidates, rendered Republican success a foregone conclusion. By some at least of the politicians the division was deliberately intended to produce that result, while the great mass of the people opposed to Mr. Lincoln and seriously fearing the consequences of his election, deeply deplored the condition thus brought about.

The Republican party at that time existed only at the North. For the first time in history the election threatened the country with the choice of a president by an exclusively sectional vote, and in opposition to the will of the majority of the people. On the popular vote, in fact, Mr. Lincoln was in a minority of nearly a million, and every electoral vote cast for him came from the northern states. In most of the southern states indeed there was no canvass made for him, no electoral nominations presented in his behalf.

Added to this was the fact that the one point on which his party was agreed, the one bond of opinion that held it together for political action, the one impulse held in common by all its adherents, was hostility to slavery, which the men of the South construed to mean hostility—intense and implacable—to the states in which that institution existed and even to the people of those states.

The “platform” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated, did indeed protest, as he had himself done in many public utterances, that this was a misinterpretation of attitude and purpose; that the party disclaimed all intent to interfere with slavery in the slave states; that it held firmly to the right of each state to regulate that matter for itself, and repudiated the assumption of any power on the part of the Federal government to control the action of the several states or in any wise to legislate for them on this subject.

But these pledges were taken at the South to mean no more than a desire to secure united action in an election. The party proclaimed its purpose, while letting slavery alone in the states, to forbid its extension to the new territories. This alone was deemed a program of injustice by that very active group of Southern men who, repudiating the teachings of Jefferson, and Wythe and Henry Clay, had come to believe in African slavery as a thing right in itself, a necessity of the South, a labor system to be upheld and defended and extended, upon its own merits. These men contended that the new territories were the common and equal possession of all the people; that any attempt by Federal authority to deny to the states thereafter to be formed out of those territories, the right to determine for themselves whether they would permit or forbid slavery, was a wrong to the South which had contributed of its blood and treasure even more largely than the North had done to their acquisition. They further contended that any such legislation would of necessity involve an assumption of Federal authority to control states in advance of their formation,—an assumption which might easily be construed to authorize a like Federal control of states already existing, including those that had helped to create the Union.