EXAMINER.—"When did you see him, then?"
WITNESS.—"As I was coming down, I passed the gentleman going up."
The court, of course, was highly amused at his coolness, and called another witness.—But let us turn from this fictitious anecdote to fact.
It was only the other day that I read in a Louisville paper of a gentleman going into the Gait-house Hotel, and deliberately shooting at another in the dining-saloon when full of people, missing his aim, and the hall lodging in the back of a stranger's chair who was quietly sitting at his dinner. Again, I read of an occurrence—at Memphis, I think—equally outrageous. A man hard pressed by creditors, who had assembled at his house and were urgent in their demands, called to them to keep back, and upon their still pressing on, he seized a bowie-knife in each hand, and rushed among them, stabbing and ripping right and left, till checked in his mad career of assassination by a creditor, in self-defence, burying a cleaver in his skull.
In a Natchez paper I read as follows:—"Levi Tarver, formerly a resident of Atala county, was recently killed in Texas. Tarver interrupted a gentleman on the highway; high words ensued, when Tarver gave the gentleman the lie; whereupon the latter drew a bowie-knife, and completely severed, at one blow, Levi's head from his body."
In a St. Louis paper, I read of a German, Hoffman by name, who was supposed by Baker to be too intimate with his wife, and who was consequently desired to discontinue his visits. Hoffman remonstrated in his reply, assuring the husband that his suspicions were groundless. A short time after he received a letter from Mrs. Baker, requesting him to call upon her: he obeyed the summons, and was shown into her bedroom at the hotel. The moment he got there, Mrs. Baker pulled two pistols from under the pillow, and discharged both at his head. Hoffman rushed out of the house; scarce was he in the street, when Mr. Baker and three other ruffians pounced upon him, dragged him back to the hotel, and placed guards at the door to prevent any further ingress from the street. They then stripped him perfectly naked, lashed him with cow-hides till there was scarce a sound piece of flesh in his body, dashing cold water over him at intervals, and then recommencing their barbarities. When tired of this brutality, they emasculated their wretched victim with a common table-knife. And who were these ruffians? Were they uneducated villains, whom poverty and distress had hardened into crime? Far from it. Mr. Baker was the owner of a grocery store; of the others, one was the proprietor of the St. Charles hotel, New Bremen; the second was a young lawyer, the third was a clerk in the "Planter's House." Can the sinks of ignorance and vice in any community present a more bloody scene of brutality than was here deliberately enacted, by educated people in respectable positions, in the middle of the day? What can be thought of the value of human life, when I add that all these miscreants were bailed?
These are merely the accounts which have met my eye in the natural course of reading the newspaper, for I can most truthfully declare I have not taken the slightest trouble to hunt them up. The following, which bears upon the same point, was related to me in the course of conversation at dinner, and it occurred in New Orleans. Mr. A. treads on Mr. B.'s too several times; Mr. B. kicks Mr. A. down stairs, and this at a respectable evening party. Now what does Mr. A. do? He goes outside and borrows a bowie-knife from a hack-cabman, then returns to the party, watches and follows Mr. B. to the room where the hats and cloaks were placed, seizes a favourable moment, and rips Mr. B.'s bowels open. He is tried for murder, with evidence sufficient to hang a dozen men; and, to the astonishment of even the Westerns themselves, he is acquitted. These facts occurred not many years since, and they were narrated to me by a gentleman who was at the party.
When two members of the Legislature disgraced the halls at Washington, by descending into the political arena with pistols and bowie-knives, and there entering into deadly conflict, were they not two Western members? Now, what do these occurrences prove? Certainly not that all Westerns are bloodthirsty, for many of them are the most kind, quiet, and amiable men I have ever met; but, when taken in connexion with the free use of the bowie-knife, they afford strong evidence that there is a general and extraordinary recklessness of human life; and surely, common sense and experience would both endorse the assertion, that habituating men to bloody disputes or fatal accidents has a tendency to harden both actors and spectators into utter indifference. And what is the whole of the Western river navigation but one daily—I might almost say, continual—scene of accidents and loss of life, tending to nourish those very feelings which it is the duty of every government to use all possible means to allay and humanize?
The heartless apathy with which all classes of society, with scarce individual exceptions, speak of these events is quite revolting to a stranger, and a manifest proof of the injurious moral effect of familiarizing people with such horrors. The bowie-knife, the revolver, and the river accidents, mutually act and react upon each other, and no moral improvement can reasonably be expected until some great change be effected. Government can interfere with the accidents;—deadly weapons are, to a certain extent, still necessary for self-protection. Let us hope, then, that something will ore long be done to prevent disasters pregnant with so many evils to the community, and reflecting so strongly on the United States as a nation.[[S]] Having gone off at a tangent, like a boomerang, I had better, like the same weapon, return whence I started—in military language, "as you was."
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