Verily the law of Swain is hard on the solicitor, hard on the sheriff, and hard on the witness, too!
Mountaineers place a low valuation on human life. I need not go outside my own habitat for illustrations. In our judicial district, which comprises the westernmost seven counties of North Carolina, the present yearly toll of homicides varies, according to counties, from about one in 1,000 to one in 2,500 of the population. And ours is not a feud district, nor are there any negroes to speak of. Compare these figures with the rate of homicide in the United States at large, about one to 8,300 population; of Italy, one to 66,000; Great Britain, one to 111,000; Germany, one to 200,000.
And the worst of it is that no Black Hand conspirators or ward gun-men or other professional criminals figure in these killings. Practically all of them are committed by representative citizens, mostly farmers. Take that fact home, and think what it means. Remember, too, that most of these murderers either escape with light penal sentences or none at all. The only capital sentence imposed in our district within the past ten years was upon an Indian who had assaulted and murdered a white girl (there was no red tape or procrastination about that trial, the court-house being filled with men who were ready to lynch him under the judge’s nose if the sentence were not satisfactory).
I said at the very outset of this book that “Our mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs.... And so, in order to be fair and just with these our backward kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of going back and getting an eighteenth century point of view.”
As regards the valuation of human life, what was that point of view?
The late Professor Shaler of Harvard, himself a Southerner, one time explained the prevalence of manslaughter among southern gentlemen. His remarks apply with equal truth to our mountaineers, for they, however poor they may be in worldly goods, are by no means “poor white trash,” but rather patricians, like the ragged but lofty chiefs and clansmen of old Scotland.—
“Nothing so surprises the northern people as the fact that southern men of good estate will, for what seems to the distant onlooker trifling matters of dispute, proceed to slay each other. Nothing so gravely offends the characteristic southern man as the incapacity of his brethren of northern societies to perceive that such action is natural and consistent with the rules of gentlemanly behavior. The only way to understand these differences of opinion is by a proper consideration of the history of the moral growth of these diverse peoples.
“The Southerner has retained and fostered—in a certain way reinstated—the medieval estimate as to the value of life. In the opinion of those ages it was but lightly esteemed; it was not a supreme good for which almost all else was to be sacrificed, but something to be taken in hand and put in risk in the pursuit of manly ideals.
“Modernism has worked to intensify the passion for existence until those who are the most under its dominion cannot well conceive how a man, except for some supreme duty to which he is pledged by altruistic motives, can give up his own life or take that of his neighbor. If these people of to-day will but perceive that the characteristic Southerner has preserved the motives of two centuries ago, if they will but inform themselves as to the state of mind on this subject which prevailed in the epoch when those motives were shaped in men, they will see that their judgment is harsh and unreasonable. It is much as if they judged the actions of Englishmen of the seventeenth century by the changed standards of to-day.
“Nor will it be altogether reasonable to condemn the lack of regard of life which we find in the southern gentleman as compared with his northern contemporary. We must, of course, reprobate in every way the evil consequences of this state of mind; but the question as to the propriety of that extreme devotion to continued mundane existence which is so manifest in our modern civilization is certainly open to debate. Irrational and brutal as are the ways in which the old-fashioned gentleman of the South shows that his regard for his own honor or that of his household outweighs his love of life, it must be remembered that the same condition existed in the richest ages of our race—those which gave proportionally the largest share of ability and nobility to its history.