“Mr. Poythress!”
“There lives not a more intense puritan. You have failed to remark it, because he is a gentleman. That forbids his ramming his personal convictions down other people’s throats. He is a puritan for himself and his family only. Nothing could induce him to harbor a bottle of wine under his roof; but believing that every Virginian’s house is his castle, he is equally incapable of resenting its presence on the Elmington table. I have a story about him that you have never heard.
“Years ago, he gave up the use of liquors of all kinds. For some time, however, his guests were as liberally supplied as ever. But at last he gave a dinner at which only his rarest and most costly wines were brought on the table; so that some of the gentlemen even remonstrated at his pouring out, like water, Madeira that his father had imported. What was the gastronomic horror of these gentlemen to learn, a few days afterwards, that he had caused every barrel in his cellar to be rolled out on his lawn, where, with an axe in his own hands, he staved in the head of every one. From that day to this there has not been a gill of wine or brandy in his house. Yet, to mention the ‘Maine liquor law’ to him is to shake a red flag in the face of a bull. His aversion to drinking is great; but his love of personal liberty is greater.
“Again, would it surprise you to learn that, not so very many years ago, Mr. Poythress favored freeing our slaves?”
“Mr. Poythress an abolitionist!” cried Alice, in horrified amazement.
“No,” replied Charley, smiling, “he was nothing of the kind. He was an emancipationist.”
“I fail to see the difference.”
“They are about as much alike as chalk and cheese. The Virginia emancipationists, of whom a considerable and growing party existed at the time of which I speak, favored the gradual manumission of their own slaves. An abolitionist is for freeing some one else’s. Mr. Poythress quietly spilt his own valuable wine on his lawn. Had he been an abolitionist, he would have headed a mob to burst the barrels of his neighbors.”
“Mr. Poythress an emancipationist,—well!”
“I don’t wonder at your surprise; for he is now the most ardent advocate of slavery that I know. He positively pities all those benighted countries where it does not exist. The abolitionists have converted an enthusiastic apostle of emancipation into an ardent pro-slavery champion; so infuriated is he that the Northern people are unwilling for us to get rid of slavery as they did, and as the nations of Europe have done,—gradually, and without foreign interference; and a man who once looked upon the institution as a blot upon our civilization, now regards it as its crown of glory.