Forty years ago a Virginia planter was a king, his broad acres his kingdom, his wife his queen, his children heirs to his throne, and his slaves his subjects. True, it was a petty kingdom and he but a petty monarch; but, as a rule, petty monarchs are tyrannical, and the Southern planter was not always an exception. In those days men were measured, not by moral worth, mental power, or physical stature, but by the number of acres and slaves they owned. The South has never possessed that sturdy class of yeomanry that has achieved wonders in the North. Before the war labor was performed by slaves, now it is done by hired help, the farmer himself there seldom cultivating his soil.
The home of Mr. George W. Tompkins, our acquaintance, was a marvel of beauty and taste. Located in the Northwestern portion of the State, before its division, it was just where the heat of the South was delightfully tempered by the cool winds of the North. No valley in all Virginia was more lovely. To the east were hills which might delight any mountain lover, all clothed and fringed with delicate evergreens, through which could be caught occasional glimpses of precipitous bald rocks. Over the heights the sun climbed every morning to illuminate the valley below with a radiance of glory. Mountain cascades came tumbling and plunging from mossy retreats to swell a clear pebble-strewn stream which afforded the finest trout to be found in the entire State.
The great mansion, built after the old Virginia plan, with a long stone piazza in front, stood on an eminence facing the post-road, which ran within a few rods of it. The house was substantial, heavy columns, painted white as marble, supporting the porch, and quaint, old-fashioned gables, about which the swallows twittered, breaking the lines of the roof. In the front yard grew the beech and elm and chestnut tree, their wide-spreading branches indicating an existence for centuries. A little below the structure, and south-west from it, was a colony of low, small buildings, where dwelt the slaves of Mr. Tompkins. One or two were nearer, and in these the domestics lived. These were a higher order of servants than the field-hands, and they never let an opportunity pass to assert their superiority over their fellow slaves.
Socially, as well as geographically, Mr. Tompkins' home combined the extremes of the North and South. He, with his calm face and mild gray eyes, was a native of the green hills of New Hampshire, while his dark-eyed wife was a daughter of sunny Georgia.
Mrs. Tompkins was the only child of a wealthy Georgia planter. Mr. Tompkins had met her first in Atlanta, where he was spending the Winter with a class-mate, both having graduated at Yale the year before. Their meeting grew into intimacy, from intimacy it ripened into love. Shortly after the marriage of his daughter, his only child, the planter exchanged his property for more extensive possessions in Virginia, but he never occupied this new home. He and his wife were in New Orleans, when the dread malady, yellow-fever, seized upon them, and they died before their daughter or her husband could go to them.
Mr. Tompkins, a man who had always been opposed to slavery, thus found himself the owner of a large plantation in Virginia, and more than a hundred slaves. There seemed to be no other alternative, and he accepted the situation, and tried, by being a humane master, to conciliate his wounded conscience for being a master at all.
He and his only brother, Henry, had inherited a large and valuable property from their father, in their native State. His brother, like himself, had gone South and married a planter's daughter, and become a large slave-holder. He was a far different man from his brother. Naturally overbearing and cruel, he seemed to possess none of the other's kindness of heart or cool, dispassionate reason. He was a hard task-master, and no "fire-eating" Southerner ever exercised his power more remorselessly than he, and no one hated the Abolition party more cordially. But it is not with Henry Tompkins we have to deal at present.
It was near noon the day after the travelers reached Jerry Lycan's inn. Mrs. Tompkins sat on the piazza, looking down the road that led to the village. She was one of those Southern beauties who attract at a first glance; her eyes large, and dark, and brilliant; her hair soft and glossy, like waves of lustrous silk. Of medium height, though not quite so slender as when younger, her form was faultless. Her cheek had the olive tint of the South, and as she reclined with indolent grace in her easy chair, one little foot restlessly tapping the carpet on which it rested, she looked a very queen.
The Tompkins mansion was the grandest for many miles around, and the whole plantation bore evidence of the taste and judgment of its owner. There seemed to be nothing, from the crystal fountain splashing in front of the white-pillared dwelling to the vast fields of corn, wheat and tobacco stretching far into the back-ground, which did not add to the beauty of the place.