Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
One morning in August, 1863, a young clergyman was called out of bed in a
hotel at Lawrence, Kansas. The man who called him was one of Quantrell's
guerrillas, and he wanted him to hurry downstairs, and be shot. All over
the border town that morning people were being murdered. A band of raiders
had ridden in early to perpetrate the Lawrence massacre.
The guerrilla who called the clergyman was impatient. The latter, when
fully awake, was horrified by what he saw going on through his window. As
he came downstairs the guerrilla demanded his watch and money, and then
wanted to know if he was an abolitionist. The clergyman was trembling. But
he decided that if he was to die then and there, it would not be with a
lie on his lips. So he said, yes, he was, and followed up the admission
with a remark that immediately turned the whole affair into another
channel.
He and the guerrilla sat down on the porch, while people were being killed
through the town, and had a long talk. It lasted until the raiders were
ready to leave. When the clergyman's guerrilla mounted to join his
confederates he was strictly on the defensive. He handed back the New
Englander's valuables and apologized for disturbing him, and asked to be
thought well of.
That clergyman lived many years after the Lawrence massacre. What did he
say to the guerrilla? What was there in his personality that led the
latter to sit down and talk? What did they talk about?
'Are you a Yankee abolitionist?' the guerrilla had asked.
'Yes--I am,' was the reply, 'and you know very well that you ought to be
ashamed of what you're doing.'
This drew the matter directly to a moral issue. It brought the guerrilla
up roundly. The clergyman was only a stripling beside this seasoned border
ruffian. But he threw a burden of moral proof on to the raider, and in a
moment the latter was trying to demonstrate that he might be a better
fellow than circumstances would seem to indicate.
After waking this New Englander to kill him on account of his politics, he
spent twenty minutes on the witness stand trying to prove an alibi. He
went into his personal history at length. He explained matters from the
time when he had been a tough little kid who wouldn't say his prayers, and
became quite sentimental in recalling how one thing had led to another,
and that to something worse, and so on, until--well, here he was, and a
mighty bad business to be in, pardner. His last request, in riding away,
was: 'Now, pardner, don't think too hard of me, will you?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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