by O. Henry
William Swaim had convictions and he hewed to the line. When “the nabob gentry” of Greensboro, as he called them, sought to bend the Patriot to their own purposes, he wrote as follows (May 30, 1832):
They soon learned from our tone that we would sooner beg for bread and be free than to compromise our principles for a seat upon a tawdry throne of corruption. Still bent upon the fell purpose of preventing, if possible, an unshackled press from growing into public favor, their last resort was to ransack hell, from the centre to the circumference, for slanderous fabrications; and these have been heaped upon us, without cause and without mercy, even until now. But thanks to a generous public, they have thus far sustained us “through evil as well as through good report,” and we would rather bask for one hour in their approving smiles than to spend a whole eternity amidst the damning grins of a concatenation of office-hunters, despots, demagogues, tyrants, fools, and hypocrites.
When subscribers subscribed but took French leave, Editor Swaim threw the lasso after them in this wise:
STOP THE RUNAWAYS!
The following is a list of gentlemen who, after reading our paper for a time, have politely disappeared and left us the “bag to hold.” We give the name of each, together with the amount due, and the place of his residence at the time he patronized us. Should this publication meet the eye of any delinquents and should they yet conclude to forward to us the amount due, we will publicly acknowledge the receipt and restore him who sends it to better credit than an act of the legislature could possibly give. Any person who will favor us with information of the residence of any or all of these absentees shall have the right to claim the homage of our sincere thanks:
Joseph Aydelotte, Esq., Guilford County, North Carolina. Twelve dollars.
John Lackey, Tarboro. Nine dollars.
James Hiatt, not recollected. Nine dollars.
“William Atkinson, unknown. Nine dollars.
Jacob Millers, not recollected. Nine dollars.
Joseph Bryan, whipt anyhow and may be hung. Six dollars.
Is there not at least a hint of O. Henry in this “unexpected crack of the whip at the end?”
William Swaim believed that the lines had fallen to him in an evil age. He was an ardent Whig, a bitter opponent of Jackson and all things Jacksonian, a fearless and independent fighter for the right as he saw the right, and an equal foe of fanaticism in the North and of slavery in the South. His style was ponderous rather than weighty, the humour being entirely unconscious. “I am surprised,” he writes, “that my old friend Jonathan suffered this limb of the law to put afloat under the sanction of his name such a tissue of falsehood, malignity, and spleen.” One must go to Jeff Peters of “The Gentle Grafter” for a sentence the equal of that. “Let me tell you first,” said Jeff, “about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye.”
The ablest thing that this grandfather of O. Henry ever wrote was a protest against slavery. He was an advocate of the gradual emancipation of the slaves, a society for this purpose having been formed at Center, ten miles from Greensboro, as early as 1816. Center was a Quaker stronghold, its most influential family being the Worth family, to which O. Henry’s grandmother on his father’s side belonged. Hinton Rowan Helper, the most famous of North Carolina’s abolitionists, refers to the valiant services of Daniel Worth in “The Impending Crisis,” a book often compared with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as a sort of co-herald of the doom of slavery. “William Swaim was greeted,” says Cart- land,* “with a storm of abuse, but he boldly published his sentiments and often gave the threatening letters *See “Southern Heroes or the Friends in War Time,” by Fernando G. Cartland.
which he received a conspicuous place in the Patriot.” In 1882 Daniel It. Goodloe writes to Lyndon Swaim from Washington, D. C.:
William Swaim in 1830 published a pamphlet entitled “An Address to the People of North Carolina on the Evils of Slavery” with mottoes in Latin and English. The imprint is “William Swaim, Printer, Greensboro, N. C. 1830.” Some twenty-seven or thirty years ago the abolitionists of New York republished, I suppose, a facsimile of the original, and Mr. Spofford, the librarian of Congress, has procured a copy. He asked me who was the author, as it is a rule with him to give, as far as possible, the name of every author. I should have quoted in the title that it purports to be written and published “By the Friends of Liberty and Equality.” William Swaim introduces the address with a few words over his signature, stating that it emanates from the “Board of Managers of the Manumission Society of North Carolina.” I will thank you to write me all you know of this Manumission Society and of the authorship of this pamphlet. The pamphlet does great honor to all concerned with it, and their names should be known in this day of universal liberty.
O. Henry’s grandmother, who married Lyndon Swaim after the death of her husband William Swaim, was Abia Shirley (or Abiah Shirly), daughter of Daniel Shirley, a wealthy planter, of Princess Anne County, Virginia. ‘‘The original Abia Shirley,” O. Henry once remarked to an intimate friend in New York, “was related to the House of Stuart but she ran off with a Catholic priest.” Where O. Henry learned this bit of ancestral history I do not know; but that the Shirley family to which his grandmother traced her lineage was among the most loyal adherents of the Stuarts admits of little doubt. A letter from Charles II to the widow of Sir Robert Shirley, Sir Robert having died in the Tower “after seven times being imprisoned there and suspected to be poisoned by the Usurper Oliver Cromwell,” runs as follows:*
Brusselles 20 Oct. 1657.
It hath been my particular care of you that I have this long deferred to lament with you the greate losse that you and I have sustained, least insteede of comforting, I might farther expose you to the will of those who will be glad of any occasion to do you further prejudice; but I am promised that this shall be put safely into your hands, though it may be not so soone as I wish; and I am very willing you should know, which I suppose you cannot doubte, that I bear a greate parte with you of your affliction and whenever it shall be in my power to make it lighter, you shall see I retayne a very kinde memory of your frinde by the care I shall have of you and all his relations: and of this you may depende upon the worde of your very affectionate Frinde Charles R.
This Sir Robert Shirley, who met his death in 1656, was one of the Shirleys of Wiston (or Whiston), in Sussex, though he lived in Leicestershire; and it was after Sir Thomas Shirley of Wiston that Shirley, the beautiful old Virginia place, was named;f Built at an unknown date just above the point where the Appomattox River enters the James, this historic *See “Stemmata Shirleiana” (1841), which makes, however, no references to the American Shirleys.
home, with its three lofty stories and two-storied porches, its wide-spreading lawn and massive oaks, contests with Monticello the primacy among Virginia’s ancestral seats. Here was born Anne Hill Carter, the wife of Light Horse Harry Lee and the mother of Robert E. Lee. As far back as 1(>22, in the history of the Indian massacre of that year, the Plantation of West Shirley in Virginia is mentioned as one of the “five or six well-fortified places” into which the survivors gathered for defense. It was from the Shirleys of Wistoii, who gave the name to the plantation and later to the home, that the Shirley family of Princess Anne County always traced their descent. Though I have been unable to find an Abia Shirley antedating O. Henry’s grandmother, William Swaim, in a letter lying before me, dated Greensboro, N. C., May 22, 1830, speaks of Nancy Shirley, his wife’s sister, ‘‘who had intermarried with Thomas Bray.” It is at least a noteworthy coincidence that a sixteenth-century Beatrix Shirley of Wiston married “Sir Edward Bray, the elder, of Vachery, Surrey County, Knight.” *
* “Stemmata Shirleiana.”
But whether “the original Abia Shirley” was fact or fancy, it is certain that the Abia Shirley, who became O. Henry’s grandmother, lived a gracious and exemplary life in Greensboro and bequeathed a memory still cherished by the few fr
iends who survive her.
The following obituary notice, signed “A Friend,” appeared in the Patriot of January, 1858:
Died. — In this place on Monday morning, January 18th, Mrs. Abia Swaim, wife of Lyndon Swaim, in the 50th year of her age. For nearly two years Mrs. Swaim had been confined to her room, and most of that time to her bed, by consumption — constantly in pain, which she patiently endured with great Christian fortitude. She leaves an affectionate husband and a devoted daughter to mourn their loss. In her death the “poor and the needy” have been deprived of an invaluable friend; for no one in this community was more ready to contribute to the relief of poverty and hunger than the subject of this notice. She was always ready to watch around the sick bed of her friends, and all who knew her were her friends; I believe she had no enemies.
Mrs. Swaim was a native of Eastern Virginia — her maiden name being Shirly. On arriving to womanhood, she removed to this place with her sister, the late Mrs. Carbry, and was afterward united in marriage with William Swaim. He dying, she remained a widow several years, when she was married to Lyndon Swaim.
She embraced religion in her youth, and for a quarter of a century lived an exemplary and acceptable member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, exhibiting on all occasions a strong and lively faith in the efficacy of the blood of Christ; and while her friends drop many sympathizing tears with her bereaved family, they can in their sorrow’ all rejoice in full assurance that her never-dying spirit is now united with that of a sweet infant daughter who preceded her to heaven; and that at the great resurrection morn, her body will be raised to life everlasting. May we all strive to imitate her many virtues, that when the summons of death comes, we may be able to die as she died, at peace with God ana man, and gently close our eyes in sleep.
The “devoted daughter” was Mary Jane Virginia Swaim, O. Henry’s mother. She was twenty-five years old at the time of her mother’s death and married Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter three months later. Only seven years had passed when the Patriot bore the following announcement:
DIED
In Greensboro, N. C., September 26, 1865, Mrs. Mary V. Porter, wife of Dr. A. S. Porter, and only child of the late William Swaim. Mrs. Porter leaves a devoted husband and three small children, together with numerous friends to mourn her early death. She gave, in her last moments, most satisfactory evidence that she had made her peace with God, and her friends can entertain no doubt of her happiness in the spirit land. She was aged about thirty years; was a graduate of Greensboro Female College; and possessed mental faculties of high order, finely developed by careful training. Her death is a great social loss to our community; but especially to her affectionate husband and three little children. Her disease was consumption.
Whether O. Henry remembered his mother or not it would be impossible to say. Certain it is that he cherished the thought of her with a devotion and pride and sense of temperamental indebtedness that he felt for no one else, nor for all his other relatives put together. Whatever vein of quiet humour marked his allusions to the other members of his family or to his family history, his mother’s name was held apart. She was to him “a thing ensky’d and sainted.” There was always an aureole about her. The poems that she wrote and the pictures that she painted — or rather the knowledge that she had written poems and painted pictures — exercised a directive and lasting influence upon him. Had she lived she would have given to the Porter home an atmosphere that it never had after 1865. She would have enabled her gifted son to find himself many years earlier than he did and she would have brought him to his goal not “By a route obscure and lonely”but along the broad highway of common tastes and common sympathies.
Lyndon Swaim gave his step-daughter every educational advantage that Greensboro offered and then as now no town in North Carolina offered as many to women. There were two colleges for women on old West Market Street, both very near and one almost opposite the house in which O. Henry’s mother was to spend all of her short married life. Both institutions had already begun to attract students from other Southern States. One was the Greensboro Female College, now the Greensboro College for Women, a Methodist school, the corner-stone of which was laid in 1843 and the later history of which has been the romance of education in North Carolina. The other was the Edgeworth Female Seminary, a Presbyterian school, founded and owned by Governor John Motley Morehead, whose influence on the industrial and cultural development of the State remains as yet unequalled.
Edgeworth opened its doors in 1840 and was burned in 1872. O. Henry’s mother attended both schools, graduating from the Greensboro Female College in 1850, the year in which Dr. Charles F. Deems assumed control. Her graduating essay bore the strangely prophetic title, “The Influence of Misfortune on the Gifted.”
She entered Edgeworth at the age of twelve and during her one session there she studied Bullion’s “English Grammar,” Bolmar’s “Physics,” Lincoln’s “Botany,” besides receiving “instruction in the higher classes and in the French language.” During her four years at the Greensboro Female College she studied rhetoric, algebra, geometry, logic, astronomy, White’s “Universal History,” Butler’s “Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature,” and Alexander’s “Evidences of the Authenticity, Inspiration, and Canonical Authority of the Holy Scriptures.” She specialized in French and later in painting and drawing. The flyleaves of her copy of Alexander’s “Evidences” — and doubtless of Butler’s “Analogy” if it could be found — are covered with selections from her favourite poets, while dainty sketches of gates, trees, houses, and flowers, filling the inter-spaces, show that she relieved the tedium of classroom lectures exactly as her son was to do thirty years later.
That O. Henry’s mother was an unusually bright scholar is attested by both teachers and classmates. Rev. Solomon Lea, the first President of the Greensboro Female College, writes December 1, 184G, to Lyndon Swaim: “Your daughter Mary ranks No. 1 in her studies, has an excellent mind, and will no doubt make a fine scholar.” Says one of her classmates, Mrs. Henry Tate: “Mary Swaim was noted in her school days as a writer of beautiful English and the school girls came to depend upon her for their compositions. She wrote most of the graduating essays for the students.” Mrs. Tate adds that O. Henry resembled his mother in personal appearance and in traits of character.
The following letter, written by her at the age of fifteen to her step-father, almost the only letter of O. Henry’s mother that has been preserved, seems here and there to hint if it does not fore-announce something of the humorous playfulness of the son. Note especially the tendency to give an unexpected turn to common sayings and quotations, a device that became in O. Henry’s hands an art:
Greensboro, Sept. 21, 1848.
Dear Father: Your letter reached us last Monday, having come by Raleigh as also did Dr. Mebane’s. We were very anxious to hear from you before we received your letter, but it came like an “Angel’s visit” bringing peace to our anxious minds. We are all well at present and want to see you very much. Your letter was very interesting to us all from its being a description of your travels. From what you wrote I should judge you had not received my letter which I wrote agreeable to your request. Mother says she is very glad to hear that your health is improving and she wants to see you when you come home looking as portly as Dr. Cole* or Governor Morehead. There is no news of interest stirring in town at this time. Last Sunday evening there was a sudden death in the Methodist Church. A negro belonging to Mrs. Bencini was either shouting or talking to the mourners when she fell dead on the spot. Mr. Armfield’s daughter died last week. There is little or no sickness in town at present.
Sherwood you know always does keep a “stiff upper lip” for he rarely if ever shaves, only when he is in the neighbourhood of Miss Betsey or Miss Martha or Miss Maria or a dozen of Misses at whom he casts sheep eyes. You said as you passed through Lexington you saw Miss Salisbury teaching some “young ideas how to shoot.” I am sure if they were
as large as I they would not have needed her assistance to teach them how to shoot, especially if they shoot with a bow, for generally such ideas learn how to shoot with that sort of a weapon by instinct. All the family send their love to you, and Mother says again: “Take good care of yourself and come home soon.” As I am to have this letter finished by twelve o’clock and it is only a few minutes of that time, I must stop here, not before saying, however, to make haste and come home. If you do not start home right off, you must write again.
Yours affectionately Mary V. Swaim.
The resemblances between O. Henry and his mother are still further revealed in these “Memories of the *This was Br. J. L. Cole with whom lived his nephew C. C. Cole. The latter, a young graduate of Trinity College, N. C., was soon to edit the Times of Greensboro, to which William Gilmore Simms, John Esten Cooke, and Mrs. Lydia Huntly Sigourney contributed regularly. C. C. Cole became Colonel of the Twenty-second Regiment and was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863.
Mother of a Gifted Writer,” sent me by Mr. William Laurie Hill:
In the days of the old four horse stage coach and the up and down hill stretch of our country roads leading from one town or village to another, there were but fifty miles of road between the old Revolutionary village of Milton, North Carolina, and the more aspiring town of Greensboro. For a high type of social life old Milton, although a village, had no superior in the State, and her people, although “stay at home bodies,” claimed many friends even in distant parts. In summer many of her homes were filled with visitors and in those halcyon days of peace and plenty it was a delight to keep open house.