Balaam and His Master, and Other Sketches and Stories

by Joel Chandler Harris

But the man, like so many of his fellow-citizens then and thereafter, was land-hungry. He bought and bought until he had acquired the immense domain, which, by some special interposition of fate or circumstance, is still intact. Meantime he had built him a house which was in keeping with the extent and richness of his landed possessions. It was planned in the old colonial style, but its massive proportions were relieved by the tall red chimneys and the long and gracefully fashioned colonnade that gave both strength and beauty to the spacious piazza which ran, and still runs, the whole length of the house.

When Bolling Bascom died, in 1830, aged seventy years, as the faded inscription on the storm-beaten tablet in the churchyard shows, he left his son, Briscoe Bascom, to own and manage the vast estate. This son was thirty years old, and it was said of him that he inherited the gentle qualities of his mother rather than the fiery energy and ambition of his father.

Bolling Bascom was neither vicious nor reckless, but he was a thorough man of the world. He was, in short, a typical Virginian gentleman, who for his own purposes had settled in Georgia.

Whatever the cause of his emigration, it is certain that Georgia gained a good citizen. It was said of him that he was a little too fond of a fiddle, but with all his faults—with all his love for horse-racing and fox-hunting—he found time to be kind to his neighbors, generous to his friends, and the active leader of every movement calculated to benefit the State or the people; and it may be remarked in passing, that he also found time to look after his own affairs.

Naturally, he was prominent in politics. He represented his county in the legislature, was at one time a candidate for governor, and was altogether a man who had the love and the confidence of his neighbors. He gave his son the benefit of the best education the country afforded, and made the tour of Europe with him, going over the ground that he himself had gone over in his young days.

But his European trip, undertaken when he was an old man, was too much for him. He was seized with an illness on his return voyage, and, although he lived long enough to reach home, he never recovered. In a few years his wife died; and his son, with little or no experience in such matters,—since his time had been taken up by the schools and colleges,—was left to manage the estate as best he could.

It was the desire of Bolling Bascom that his son should study law and make that profession a stepping-stone to a political career. He had been ambitious himself, and he hoped his son would also be ambitious. Besides, was not politics the most respectable of all the professions? This was certainly the view in Bolling Bascom’s day and time, and much might be said to support it. Of all the professions, politics opened up the one career best calculated to tickle the fancy of the rich young men.

To govern, to control, to make laws, to look after the welfare of the people, to make great speeches, to become statesmen—these were the ideas that filled the minds of ambitious men in Bolling Bascom’s time, and for years thereafter. And why not? There were the examples of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, Hamilton, Webster, Calhoun, and the Adamses of Massachusetts. What better could a young man do than to follow in the footsteps of these illustrious citizens?