field sports. They rode from their infancy. In the Chickasaws they had a good breed of horses, which was greatly improved by crossing with English blooded horses. Great attention was paid to the breeding of horses; and they were trained to two gaits, walking and cantering. The saddle horses were excellent hunters, and would seldom hesitate to take a sixrail fence at a leap. The boys and girls learned to ride on tackies, which, though small, were active, enduring and easy gaited. The low country was not suited for fox-hunting, it was too cut up with creeks, marshes and swamps. The great sport was deer hunting. The clubs met early in the day. The hounds, usually in charge of a negro, soon found the scent and with full cry began the chase. Their baying was the most exhilarating music to the ears of the huntsman. They knew the country and the habits of the deer and would take their stands at certain places, and the deer, unless brought down at the earlier stands would run the gauntlet of many guns.10

To the boys on the plantations the dearest place was the "back-water," the partly artificial reservoir for storing water wherewith to flood the rice fields at stated seasons. Here was his best chance for shooting wild ducks, if he got there just at day dawn on some cold, frosty morning. From its dams, too, under some spreading wild mulberry or dogwood, he could fish to his heart's content, and if the plantation were one of those on salt water, he could fish, or crab, or get raccoon oysters, with the aid of a bait.

The people were as fond of indoor amusements as of field sports. Hence they cultivated music and the knowledge of games of various sorts. These could be indulged in even in the summer homes; and there also, if there was less for the boy in the way of outdoor sports, and more required in the way of dress and attendance on school, he could at least enjoy the cavalcades, "in which there was just as much ceremony in inviting a partner for the ride and sticking faithfully to her side, as if it had been a dance in which the same couple were partners from first to last."

On these cavalcades, on which many matches are said to have been made, and in frequent parties at the different homes the young people found their chief opportunities for intercourse. At the parties, which were regular affairs, there

10 cf. McCrady, Ibid., pp. 517, ff.

was not only the means of gratifying the taste for amusement but that of the palate, though the fare in the summer village could never quite compare with that in the plantation house. To illustrate from the substantials of the feast: in the summer settlement wheat waffles, rice waffles, wheat loaf-bread, rice loaf-bread, biscuits, johnny cakes, muffins, pancakes, domestic fowls, beef, and mutton, vegetables in season, etc., could be commanded; but at the plantation in the winter, in addition to all these, wild turkey, venison, wild duck and the fruit of the sea, for if the master or a son were not good with the gun and rod, there was always a crack shot on the plantation freely supplied with gun and ammunition in order that his master's table might be improved, and more than one successful fisherman. The people generally lived plentifully and well. Theirs was in no sense a somber life.

Political excitement has been a frequent feature of South Carolina. The excitement ran high in young Palmer's day. South Carolina, along with a number of other States, held that the power to levy duties on imports, not with a view to revenue, but to protect and aid particular classes, was not delegated to Congress. An odious, because discriminating, tariff had been borne while it was necessary in order to the payment of of the public debt. But when the debt had been paid and a large surplus was accumulating in the national treasury, the State demanded that the tariff should be conformed to the need for revenue. The demand was refused, the robbery wrought by the protective tariff continued, and continued to exasperate the South. The great leaders in South Carolina, Calhoun, Haynes, McDuffie and others, had recourse to a measure justifiable only on the ground that it was a warning that secession would follow it, if it proved ineffective. "She interposed her prerogative as a sovereign State, to judge, in the last resort, in all questions affecting her own rights, restraining the general government from collecting this revenue within her limits.' It was not ineffective. Congress passed the "Force Bill," clothing the President with the power necessary to enforce the collection, and for this purpose putting at his disposal all the land and naval forces. But for some such instrumentality as that of Mr. Clay, in his famous Compromise Act, which yielded the principle of protection while providing "a gradual reduction of duties, and that at the expiration of ten years, twenty per cent. ad valorem should be established as the uniform

rate," there had been a collision. While some strong men opposed it, the prevailing sentiment of the people of the State demanded Nullification; and the low country, with the exception of a party in Charleston under the lead of Mr. Petigru, was almost unanimously in favor of Nullification and profoundly convinced of the right of secession. As time wore on they conceived that secession was a duty.

We shall have occasion to note in the sequel that young Palmer was, in the days of his youth, drinking in the views of the great political thinkers of the State.

The moral and religious tone of this region of the low country was excellent during these decades. Horse-racing, gambling and hard drinking had prevailed to a considerable extent in early colonial times. Nor had these habits been uprooted by the preaching of Whitefield, though they had been checked. But providences connected with the Revolutionary War, the work of evangelical ministers of all denominations and particularly the revivals under the Rev. Daniel Baker about 1831, did much to lift up the standard of morality and religion. The communities in which he grew up were Sabbath-observing, condemned worldly amusements, often thought to be entirely compatible with the profession of Christianity, and in general showed a sympathy with a mildly Puritan mode of life.

With this sketch of the environment into which our subject was born and in the midst of which he developed his God-given powers, we pass to the exhibition of his early life.

CHAPTER III.

BOYHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH.

(1818-1832.)

SUMMARY OF HIS INHERITED POWERS, AND OF THE FORCES OF HIS ENVIRONMENT.-CHARLESTON THE PLACE OF HIS BIRTH.-THE HISTORY OF MR. EDWARD PALMER'S FAMILY, 1821-1824, SKETCHED.-Rev. EDWARD PALMER'S FAMILY AT DORCHESTER.-AT WALTERBORO.— "BEN PALMER" AS A SCHOOLBOY AT WALTERBORO.-THE PALMER FAMILY AT MCPHERSONVILLE.

'HE 25th day of January, 1818, in the home of his parents,

Charleston, S. C., Benjamin Morgan Palmer was born. The foregoing chapters have made it clear that he was sprung of excellent stock, and born into the midst of a civilization at once unique, commanding and noble. They have made it clear that it is only fair to look to him to manifest the sentiment of devotion to duty for which the early and honest Puritan was so remarkable; to disclose a strong native bent toward culture; to discover vigor of practical as well as intellectual character; to display sweetness of disposition along with virile motives of conduct, and strength of determination; to reveal in himself capacity for breadth of view, generosity in estimating sympathetically, so far as truth allows, diverse systems of philosophy and faith, while at the same time holding, on his own part, a very definite system of philosophy and faith; and to develop somewhat of John Calvin's power to entertain Christian friendship with those between whom and himself there may lie some great differences as to things not absolutely essential. These chapters have also made it clear that we should naturally expect civil and social sentiments colored by the ideals in vogue, not in Ohio, or in New England, or in some European country; but in the State of his nativity and of his moulding. Born and brought up in some other country, he had been somewhat otherwise.

As a matter of fact, he appears to have derived from his mother, and brought into the world at his birth, a penetrating, intense, and powerful intellect and capacities for the formation

of a character equal to his intellect in its dignity, intensity, persistence and power. From his father he seems to have received a sense of personal dignity, the tendency to constant courtesy, the spirit of broad charity, and sound common sense. From the Morgans came his aggressiveness and his strong but tempered self reliance.

Thus he begins life, with a certain seriousness and earnestness contributed by the Palmer blood, which "was warranted to go a long way and keep clean and sweet to the end," with the self-reliant aggressiveness of the Morgans, and the intensity, buoyancy and brilliancy of his attracted and attractive mother, Sarah Bunce, who not only put her impress upon him. in bearing him, but as we shall see, exerted the chief moulding influence upon him during his youth.

The impress of his mother State upon him has already been affirmed, and certain particulars of it pointed out. In his political views, in his bearing in society, in his breadth of sympathies, in his regard for the family and the home, he was a South Carolinian of the highest type. How large and full and clear was the impress of all that was noble in his environment upon him, will appear more fully in the sequel. For the present it will suffice to have further said: It was inevitable that a youth so impressible and so thoughtful should be affected by his civil and social surroundings. He was under a necessity of nature to note and approve, or disapprove, of that civilization, to condemn it in whole, or in part, or to take it to his heart. He was to be affected by all he met, in some way or in another, and he was to respond actively to every affection. He was not to vegetate; he was to live.

The city in which Benjamin Morgan Palmer was born was a beautiful and cultured city. The Charlestonese prided themselves on the fact that their pronunciation of English was equaled on this side of the Atlantic only in the city of Boston, Mass. It was a place of breadth of sympathies, too. Neither in the State nor in this city, which for a long time had been the colony of South Carolina, had there ever been any considerable prejudice against any man on account of his nationality or religion. The population, while coming from many European, West Indian, and other colonial sources, and containing some unworthy elements, was derived for the most part, from the best of the European peoples,—the English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, Huguenots, Dutch from New York,