Not being of a thrifty and forehanded habit, the Colonel’s father never rose to the possession of more than three slaves at a time; but he made up for his deficiency in this respect by beating these three all the more frequently. They were a miserable set, and, to tell the truth, deserved many of the whippings they got. The owner was out of pocket by them, year after year, but was too shiftless a manager to provide against the loss, and was too proud to get rid of the encumbrances altogether. He and his children and his neighbors were kept poor, squalid, and degraded by a system that in effect made them the serfs of a few rich proprietors, who, by discrediting white labor, were able to buy up at a trifling cost the available lands, and then impoverish them by the exhausting crops wrung from the generous soil by large gangs of slaves under the rule of superior capital and intelligence. And yet no lord of a thousand “niggers” could be a more bigoted upholder than the Hydes of “our institutions, sir.” (Living by jugglery, Slavery usually speaks of _the_ institution as our _institutions_.) They would foam at the mouth in speaking of those men of the North who dared to question the divinity and immutability of slavery. To deny its right to unlimited extension was the one kind of profanity not to be pardoned. It was worse than atheism to say that slavery was sectional and freedom national. To the Colonel’s not very clear geographical conceptions the white Americans south of Mason and Dixon’s line were, with hardly an exception, descendants of noblemen and gentlemen; while all north were, to borrow the words of Mr. Jefferson Davis, either the “scum of Europe” or “a people whose ancestors Cromwell had gathered from the bogs and fens of Ireland and Scotland.”[13] Colonel Delancy Hyde revelled in those genealogical invectives of a similar tenor by a Richmond editor, whose fatuous and frantic iterations that the Yankees were the descendants of low-born peasants and blackguards, while the Southern Americans are the progeny of the English cavaliers, betrayed a ludicrous desire to strengthen his own feeble belief in the asseveration by loud and incessant clamor; for he had faith in Sala’s witty saying, that, if a man has strong lungs, and will keep bawling day after day that he is a genius or a gentleman, the public will at last believe him. The Colonel never tired of denouncing the Puritans:—“A canting, hyppercritical set of cusses, sir; but they had some little fight in ’em, though they couldn’t stahnd up agin the caval’yers,—no sir-r-r!—the caval’yers gev ’em particular hell; but the Yankee spawn of these cusses,—they hev lost the little pluck the Puritans wonst had, and air cowards, every mother’s son on ’em. One high-tone Southern gemmleman—one descendant of the caval’yers—can clare out any five on ’em in a fair fight.”