“When, a few years before the war broke out, I again visited ‘Betsey’s Pride,’ it was to see a woeful change in the circumstances of the returned prodigal, my cousin. Chester’s parents had died, his sisters had lived on there in seclusion, little knowing that his extravagance had wasted all his own and involved their substance. When he finally turned up again, like a bad penny, at their home, it was to linger a few months and die. In his last illness poor Llewellyn was nursed by Leander as no one else could have nursed him. Such fidelity, tenderness! Well, it’s not of that I started out to tell. Llew Chester under the cedars of the family burying-ground, his sisters had to hear that they were ruined in fortune. But, then or since, those two women would never hear a word said against ‘poor Llew.’
“Here comes in,” went on the General, doughtily, “a chapter fortunately not common among the slave-holding families of those days. As the negroes on large plantations went on multiplying and exacting care and outlay, the revenues of their owners were naturally consumed. But it was part of our religion to hold fast to the trust committed to us by our fathers. Nothing but dire want ever made a Virginian of ‘the real sort’ part with a slave for money. When dire want came, so much the worse for slave and master. It was a degradation that bowed down the seller to the earth with shame--to have to part with these people of our black families. If anybody ever tells you to the contrary, Miss Eunice, send him to me to be convinced.”
The General, growing red in the face, winked, gulped, got up and walked up and down the room, tugged at his mustache, then sat down.
“I suppose none of you ever heard of the character as much avoided in the society of decent men with us as the headsman is in France--the negro broker and trader. But there he was, often growing fat and rich on the proceeds of his horrid business; and, like the headsman, when occasion demanded he turned up. Chester had slighted in public one of the most formidable of this fraternity, a man named Israel Johns, a sullen bully, who laid up the slight in silence and bided his time for revenge.
“As it happened, Johns’s opportunity did not come till the breath had left his enemy’s body. When it was known that the Misses Chester would be forced to part with all of their ‘likely’ black people, in order to pay the debts of the estate and live, the deepest feeling was everywhere shown for the pair. My own mother went a two days’ journey on horseback to weep with them. Remember, the oversupply of slaves in Virginia made their buyers very particular to select the best, and it was therefore much feared by the friends of the family that the first man to go off would be Leander Jameson.”