eir mark unerringly.[295] Did she know that just such
treatment--strange paradox--won, while it at times wounded, the heart
of the unromantic Westerner?

Colonel Robert Martin was a typical, western North Carolina planter.
He belonged to that stalwart line of Martins whose most famous
representative was Alexander, of Revolutionary days, six times
Governor of the State. On the banks of the upper Dan, Colonel Martin
possessed a goodly plantation of about eight hundred acres, upon which
negro slaves cultivated cotton and such of the cereals as were needed
for home consumption.[296] Like other planters, he had felt the
competition of the virgin lands opened up to cotton culture in the
gulf plains of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and like his
fellow planters, he had invested in these Western lands, on the Pearl
River in Mississippi. This Pearl River plantation was worked by about
one hundred and fifty negroes and was devoted to the raising of
cotton.

When Douglas accepted Reid's invitation to visit North Carolina, the
scene of the romance begun on the Potomac shifted to the banks of the
Dan. Southern hospitality became more than a conventional phrase on
Douglas's lips. He enjoyed a social privilege which grew rarer as
North and South fell apart. Intercourse like this broke down many of
those prejudices unconsciously cherished by Northerners. Slavery in
the concrete, on a North Carolina plantation, with a kindly master
like Colonel Martin,[297] bore none of the marks of a direful tyranny.
Whatever may have been his mental reservations as to slavery as a
system of labor, Douglas could not fail to feel the injustice of the
taunts hurled against his Southern friends by the Abolitionist press.
As he saw the South, the master was not a monster of cruelty, nor the
slave a victim of malevolent violence.

The romance on the banks of the Dan flowed far more clearly and
smoothly toward its goal than the waters of that turbid stream. On
April 7, 1847, Miss Martin became the wife of the Honorable Stephen
Arnold Douglas, who had just become Senator from the State of
Illinois. It was in every way a fateful alliance. Next to his Illinois
environment, no external circumstance more directly shaped his career
than his marriage to the daughter of a North Carolina planter. The
subtle influences of a home and a wife dominated by Southern culture,
were now to work upon him. Constant intercourse with Southern men and
women emancipated h