nor cast down when it appeared to go against him." The universal testimony was, that Yancey had never before been in any personal difficulty in Greenville; that he was uniformly polite and quiet; that he had a very high sense of personal honor; that he had not provoked the trouble with Dr. Earle; that the knife and bludgeon that Earle carried, when the attack was made, were in the hands of the deceased threateningly presented when the shot was fired from Yancey's pistol.

October 26, following, the prisoner was brought before the court, Josiah J. Evans presiding, for sentence. The Judge said the crowded state of the house indicated an unusual interest in the duty before him and he would depart from his ordinary rule of brevity in such cases to explain his mind. The prisoner's deportment, he said, "since the affray on the muster ground up to the moment of the difficulty with Dr. Earle, was such as was to be expected from one in his station of life. No one could believe that he had gone to that piazza with any hostile feeling towards Dr. Earle, or that he had carried there the pistol that was in his bosom for the purpose of shooting the unfortunate deceased. The court could impute to him no moral guilt. What happened there seemed to be entirely accidental, and to be attributed to the angry and excited deportment of Dr. Earle."

The Judge explained, farther, that Mr. Yancey seemed to have worn his pistol in Greenville because of habit, acquired in carrying it while passing through the Indian country of the West. "In consideration of this practice the Court had made up its judgment." The sentence was $1,500 fine and twelve months imprisonment in jail.

Governor Patrick Noble remitted two-thirds of the fine and released the prisoner. Mr. Yancey then returned with his family to Alabama.*

My authority in the facts is the Greenville Mountaineer of November 9, 1838, giving a full report of the trial and the sentence of the Court.

CHAPTER 2.

Active Forces and Decisive Events.

1840.

Mr. Yancey came to Alabama to make agriculture the fixed avocation of his life. His estate in slaves was as great as planters, just arrived at manhood, usually possessed. One hundred bales of cotton was the anticipated yield from his capital and cotton was worth fifteen cents the pound. He was a good judge of live stock and entertained plans of wider direction than the production of cotton, only, in the use of his resources. "Twelve years of my life spent among New England farms were not thrown away," he said to a friend; "come and see what a Yankee I am around my cattle sheds." Hazlitt speaks of the military turn as essential to the orator position to overcome difficulties and an aptitude for details. It is sufficient to say of Mr. Yancey as an agriculturist, that he rose early, was singularly methodical in his management and was scrupulous in meeting his debts.

a dis

Mr. and Mrs. Yancey arrived in Dallas county in the winter of 1836-37 with their slaves. William E. Bird, his mother's brother, was the county judge, and Jesse Beene, a lawyer and member of the Legislature, who had married his mother's sister, resided on his estate, "Oakland," on the Alabama river, near Cahawba, the county seat. The time was unpropitious for the purchase of land. Prices were extravagant and prudent men saw the wave of prosperity, known as " flush times,"

had attained its possible height and soon must break. Mr. Yancey, accordingly, rented a plantation near " Oakland," and took up his abode upon it with his family, accompanied by Miss Earle, his wife's sister, who had come as her associate in a fresh country.

Cahawba, on the west bank of the Alabama, the abandoned capital of the State, was a village of a single hotel of long front and two stories, where planters and their families found shelter while awaiting an hour, a day or two days, a combined freight and passenger steamer to proceed on their journey. The remaining improvements were a court house, with lawyers' offices under the same roof, three bar rooms and a postoffice cut off from one end of a small store where weekly mails were received. Every passing steamer, however, brought letters in the pockets of passengers, and the officers left the latest newspapers. Cahawba, nevertheless, was rich in a certain commerce, and important as a place where many wealthy and refined ladies and gentlemen met. Dallas was the most populous of those twelve great wooded-prairie counties, stretching in unbroken line from the Chattahoochee to beyond the Tom Bigbee. The commerce of Alabama at this time was carried only by plantation wagons and boats, save that in the valley

of the Tennessee one of the earliest of the railroads of America had been built, around the Mussel Shoals forty miles long, the cars drawn by mules. Hundreds of wagon loads of cotton bales, each drawn by six great mules, over roads cut through the towering cane, walling the impenetrable sides, came to Cahawba from twenty, thirty miles in the fall and winter harvest time. Tens of thousands of dollars in plantation and family supplies were loaded at the bluff, on the return trips of the wagons, but little for the general trade. The humble village bespoke environments unfavorable to the growth of towns. There was no traffic on its streets. The many teamsters brought no cash in their pockets. The valuable products of the plantations shipped thence, however equitably divided with producers, were held subject to another rule of division than the modern wage system. The cotton bales were consigned to factors at Mobile or New Orleans; the proceeds of sales did not return as cash. At Selma, a small village, ten miles above on the river, was the Real Estate and Banking

Company, which issued its own currency in exchange for planters' promissory notes. The planters, having shipped all the cotton of the year, went with their wives and daughters to Mobile or New Orleans to invest the proceeds in the factors` hands. As the planter was only a planter, the factor was a factor by right. Both classes were on the most amicable terms with each other. The broker was not a factor, and he would buy only from a factor. Factors and brokers were, for the most part, Northern men. So it came about, that the planter paid the factor two and one-half per cent commissions for selling to the broker, while the broker received from the distant manufacturer a fixed commission for his trouble. Both commissions, of factor and broker, came from the gross sales, besides numerous other charges, among them a sum amounting to half million a year called "lighterage," delivery of the cotton to vessels in the lower bay which could not cross the bar of the harbor. The planter, arrived in the city, made out a memorandum of his estimated year's wants to be placed in the factor's hands for purchase, and gave himself to the pleasures of society. The factor was assumed to possess certain personal prerequisites in perfecting trades which the planter was far from envying. Attached to the bills of purchase of iron, jeans, hats, sugar, etc., was the factor's second commission of two and one-half per cent to reward his tact. If the planter overdrew his crop, the factor stood ready to honor a draft at a third commission of two and one-half per cent for "acceptance," interest added. A protested draft of this character was unknown. To the extent of the surplus in the factor's hands, or the credit with the factor, the planter bought more land and sent for more slaves in the markets of Richmond and Washington city. To the extent of his surplus capital, the factor bought lands and slaves and employed overseers to manage his plantations, thus recommending himself to the society of planters as he could in no other way recommend himself. Nothing was so dear to this people as the Constitution and their social customs.

A rare and noble society was planted in the Canebrake region, tributary to Cahawba, in the early time. In low capacious houses, built of squared cedar logs, the walls papered, the floors carpeted, the wide hearth of native gray lime stone,

amplest flower beds on every side, lived graduates of Yale, of the University of Virginia, of the South Carolina college, and their wives and daughters "polished as the pillars of the temple." In all America, in town or country, no people sat down daily to more bounteous dinners, served by better servants, on richer mahogany; no people wore more fashionable clothes, rode better groomed horses of purer blood, wrote a purer vernacular, or spoke it in gentler tones. Nor were they a people without positive amusements, social surprises and excitements. As with the slave-holding Athenians, they read not many books. Oratory and conversation supplied the wholesome friction of minds. Attendance upon political debates, where no orator dared to deceive; where the best orators alone were tolerated; attendance upon the semi-annual sessions of courts of law and equity, the audience sitting for hours to hear advocates unfold evidence, and counsellors elaborate the principles of organized justice, were educational pleasures not inferior to the teachings from the porches of Athens. At Cahawba a government land sale was in progress on election day. Dixon H. Lewis was the candidate for Congress of the Democrats, and John Murphy of the Whigs. The government was selling the lands of the ejected red men. Indian removal was Jackson's policy, and all of Jackson's policies had both partisan friends and partisan foes. Excitement ran high. When Lewis opened the debate it was believed the votes were going against him. He spoke with vehemence. It was an August day, and the speaker's weight was not less than four hundred pounds; two countrymen advanced, and taking position on either side, fanned him with their broad brim hats. A young lawyer, lately elected to the Legislature, and not long out from Boston, Henry Goldthwaite, replied. Ezekiel Pickens and Dr Hogan joined in the discussion. Lewis returned to the stand, and now discussed a bill in Congress to repeal an act making it imperative in State courts to send to the Federal Supreme Court cases involving the constitutionality of federal legislation, taking the Southern or State Rights view. Goldthwaite rejoined with much earnestness, and, in the midst of his argument, Colonel Goldsby arose to propose that the speaker be called down, New England politics not being needed in Alabama. Deer, foxes